Kyiv, Ukraine – A corruption scandal that involves President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s business partner, political allies, and a cast of presumed wrongdoers who profited from a nuclear power monopoly has roiled energy-starved Ukraine.
Observers told Al Jazeera that the scandal may ruin Zelenskyy’s approval ratings, enrage Western donors and cause a political crisis that could lead to battlefield losses.
Recommended Stories
list of 4 itemsend of list
“What’s actually happening is the marauding of a state-owned company during the war, and that’s very painful for the people,” Tetiana Shevchenko of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, a group in Kyiv, told Al Jazeera.
Timur Mindich, who co-owned the District 95 comic troupe that propelled Zelenskyy to stardom and a subsequent presidency, is the presumed mastermind of the corruption scheme around contracts with Energoatom, the state-run consortium that manages Ukraine’s nuclear power stations, according to two anticorruption agencies.
Russian missiles and drones keep destroying Ukraine’s energy generation and distribution infrastructure, and nuclear power stations have become the nation’s main source of electricity.
Mindich, 46, fled Ukraine hours before investigators knocked on the door of his luxurious apartment in central Kyiv on Monday. He has reportedly travelled to Israel.
“Catching businessman Timur Mindich was almost impossible; his flight is not a surprise,” a law enforcement source told the NV.ua broadcaster.
A day later, two independent corruption watchdogs charged Mindich and seven more people with bribery, abuse of office and illegal enrichment from kickbacks of up to 15 percent from contracts with Energoatom that amounted to about $100m.
The agencies, Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), released video and audio recordings in which the group appears to use nicknames and codewords to discuss bribes and kickbacks amounting to tens of millions of dollars.
Zelenskyy, whose anticorruption presidential campaign resonated with voters in 2019, tried to curb the autonomy of both agencies in July after they opened investigations into his allies and former business partners. But he has now backed down and pledged to keep them independent after massive popular protests.
Nicknames and banknotes
“Any anticorruption actions that yield results are very important; we need the inevitability of punishment,” Zelenskyy said on Monday. “There must be convictions.”
But anticorruption expert Shevchenko dismissed his statement.
“That’s not a response. It’s like saying, ‘Let the court decide,’” she said.
“It was Zelenskyy who brought these people to power; they used his name when appointing ‘overseers’ for the energy company,” she said.
The investigation’s results were released on YouTube by NABU and offer a look at the group, their secrecy measures and actions.
Ukrainians are gripped by the scandal, which has been front-page news since Monday. About 200,000 people have viewed the YouTube video.
Mindich, who goes by “Karlsson”, a character of a Swedish children’s book, is heard talking to “Rocket”, or Ihor Mironyuk, an ex-adviser to Justice Minister German Galushchenko.
Haluschenko was suspended on Wednesday. After Ukrainian lawmakers urged him to quit, he submitted his resignation.
Energy Minister Svitlana Grinchuk also resigned on Wednesday after anticorruption officials said she had spent several nights in Haluschenko’s apartment and may have been involved in the scandal.
One more alleged mastermind, nicknamed Tenor, is Dmytro Basov, a former prosecutor and a head of Energoatom’s security department.
Another alleged group member, nicknamed “Sugarman”, is Oleksandr Tsukerman. He already faces a money laundering probe in the United States and has also fled Ukraine, the Ukrainska Pravda newspaper reported.
The group allegedly paid “Che Guevara”, or former deputy prime minister Oleksiy Chernyshov, $1.2m and 100,000 euros ($116,000).
They, however, chose to pay him with old banknotes, they said.
“It’s a pity to give Che Guevara the nice” banknotes, one of the staffers of a “laundry”, an office equipped in a medical clinic in Kyiv, is heard saying.
Chernyshov was fired in July after being accused of bribery and money laundering through the construction of luxurious mansions.
Energoatom’s management has long been accused of corruption.
An industry insider told Al Jazeera in 2019 that Energoatom’s head, Petro Kotin, was allegedly involved in opaque deals, hiding financial information and firing experienced technical staffers and managers for whistleblowing.
“They get crazy kickbacks. This is a team of marauders,” Olga Kosharna, a nuclear safety expert with decades of experience as a state nuclear regulation inspector, said at the time.
Military defeat?
The scandal resembles a “prelude” to a long television series that will attract Ukrainians for years to come, according to Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Kyiv-based Penta think tank.
Meanwhile, Zelenskyy’s political opponents “will be greatly tempted to launch a large-scale attack on the president”, Fesenko told Al Jazeera.
Such an attack would have been normal in a peaceful Ukraine, but during the war, it may trigger a “domestic political crisis that can significantly weaken the state, and in the worst case, lead to military defeat”, he said.
He warned, however, that “the case’s loud start doesn’t guarantee its successful ending.”
Fesenko referred to the Amber Affair – an investigation into two lawmakers who allegedly accepted bribes from the “amber mafia” that illegally mines the semiprecious stone in central Ukraine.
The investigation was opened in 2017 with much fanfare and the presentation of secretly recorded audio and video evidence.
But it did not result in convictions after judges said they could not accept the illegally collected evidence.
Petro Poroshenko, president at that time, pledged to adopt a law regulating amber mining, but it never materialised.
Overpriced drones?
Mindich is also reportedly connected to Firepoint, a Ukrainian company that produces deep-strike drones, aerial surveillance equipment and missiles.
Mindich denied ties to Firepoint, but the company is being investigated for corruption after winning a string of lucrative government contracts.
Germany has footed some of the bills, and the scandal may jeopardise Berlin’s future military aid.
“The lobbyists of this initiative in Germany now look thick as thieves,” Nikolay Mitrokhin of Germany’s Bremen University told Al Jazeera.
He said that the scandal is emblematic of wider corruption that often involves military procurement, embezzlement of foreign aid and even relations between officers who reportedly extort bribes from servicemen who want to take leave.
“Unfortunately, systemic corruption and decision-making based on it define the character of hostilities and the attitude of Ukraine’s population to their personal defence of such a region – something that leads to heavy consequences on the battlefield,” Mitrokhin said.
Deja vu
What enrages Ukrainians is that the scandal looks like a repetition of another political disaster that ruined Zelenskyy’s predecessor.
Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s richest man and former foreign minister, was elected president after a 2014 anti-Russian popular uprising, promising to root out Ukraine’s endemic corruption.
Five years later, an investigative report identified his childhood friend and ally as the mastermind of a scheme to sell smuggled, second-hand Russian military equipment to Ukraine’s Defence Ministry at exorbitant prices.
Poroshenko was booed off the stage during his campaign tour and lost the 2019 election to Zelenskyy, a popular comedian and first-time politician who also promised to root out corruption.
“That’s what Zelenskyy beat Poroshenko during the elections with,” anticorruption activist Shevchenko said.
“And he also promised, said, that he would literally put his friends in prison”, in case something similar happens, she said.
