Continent General Director Serhiy Sholokh Threatened

Kyiv’s Continent FM radio station regularly receives threatening phone calls, said its general director Serhiy Sholokh. A couple of weeks ago, he received one such call from a woman, allegedly from a presidential candidate’s campaign headquarters. But then a male voice cut in, “If you don’t keep your trap shut we’ll shut it for you!” Mr. Sholokh feels sure that the alleged presidential candidate has nothing to do with these threats. The next day his car was openly tailed by a Mercedes and riding down Volodymyrsky uzviz, slippery from the rain, it raced ahead and tried to drive Mr. Sholokh’s car into a road-cleaning truck. He escaped an accident by pure luck. Several hours later, another call was made: “If you think you’re a smart driver, you’re wrong. It was just a warning.”

Mr. Sholokh believes these threats are connected with Continent’s independent policy, trying to give unbiased coverage of events in Ukraine. In particular, it gives airtime to such giants as the Voice of America, BBC, and Deutsche Welle. Naturally, the current regime cannot make them say what it wants said. The station director further believes that this explains the freezing of their bank account this summer supposedly in response to a claim from a certain firm. Whoever organized this expected Continent to stop paying for transmitters, thus loosing airtime. They overlooked the fact that the station has its own tower and transmitter. In early October the court ruled that the claim of that “firm” was unlawful and the station’s bank accounted had to be reopened. Since then Serhiy Sholokh has been tailed and threatened on several occasions.

Since October 1, Continent has regularly presented “First Round with Heorhy Honhadze” offering more detailed information about the election campaign, compared to other stations, and allowing all interested parties, every listener, a chance to call and join the discussion. At times, such calls express rather unfavorable views concerning the current regime. After the first couple of broadcasts, Mr. Sholokh recalls, he was informed by people from the current President’s campaign headquarters that he was blacklisted and that they would deal with him after the elections.

All this made the Continent director forward a statement to SBU.