June 26, 2015

Another Yanukovych insider, Serhii Kliuyev, flees abroad

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KYIV – It’s been more than a year since former President Viktor Yanukovych fled Ukraine, and no one from his entourage has been arrested by the Ukrainian government, let alone prosecuted, for the murders during the Euro-Maidan protest. Never mind the billions alleged to have been pilfered in corruption schemes.

[Former Finance Minister Yurii Kobolov was arrested by Spanish police but has yet to be extradited to Ukraine. The government has seized his property in Ukraine.]

The latest Yanukovych insider to elude arrest was Serhii Kliuyev, who is widely believed to have fled the country within days after Ukraine’s Parliament voted on June 3 to strip him of his political immunity. By June 10, he was declared missing by Anton Gerashchenko, an advisor to the internal affairs minister, who confirmed a week later in Parliament that he fled to Russia through the occupied territories of Donbas.

The government’s failure to make arrests of key Yanukovych officials has infuriated critics, who believe that top state officials could have reached deals enabling their avoidance of detention and prosecution for their alleged crimes.

“I think that I’m not alone in suspecting that a non-aggression pact, a ring of protection exists between the current and past leadership of the country,” said Yegor Sobolyev, a national deputy with the Samopomich (Self-Reliance) party and chairman of the parliamentary Committee on Preventing and Countering Corruption.

The Kliuyev brothers – Serhii, 45, and Andrii, 50 – have long been political insiders, having earned their wealth in the chaotic 1990s by scooping up dozens of metallurgical, manufacturing and energy companies in their native Donbas. Their combined wealth was estimated at $323 million by the focus.ua news site in its annual survey published in April 2014 (though it was reported at more than twice that amount in previous years).

Andrii Kliuyev served as the head of the National Security and Defense Council between 2012 and 2014. Former Kyiv Mayor Oleksandr Popov said it was Mr. Kliuyev who gave the order to violently disperse protesting students on November 30, 2014, which became the event that ignited the Euro-Maidan protest.

Mr. Kliuyev disappeared after Mr. Yanukovych’s flight, with his whereabouts unconfirmed ever since.

His younger brother, Serhii, worked hard to avoid the same fate, but to no avail. In the days leading up to the fateful vote in the Verkhovna Rada, he was struggling to convince members of the parliamentary Rules Committee that the criminal charges that were being brought by the Procurator General’s Office were baseless and politically motivated.

That would have derailed the vote on his immunity.

At the committee’s May 28 meeting, Serhii Kliuyev’s American and Austrian lawyers presented findings of the Freeh Group, a firm launched by former FBI Director Louis Freeh and hired by Mr. Kliuyev.

The former FBI investigators determined that there was insufficient evidence to charge Mr. Kliuyev with a crime. Yet Mr. Kliuyev’s critics in Parliament said it was the firm’s investigators who didn’t have enough evidence and background in Ukrainian politics to reach their findings.

The parliamentary committee meeting had heated exchanges, reported the theinsider.ua news site, including more accusations of national deputies taking bribes.

Just two weeks earlier, National Deputy Oleh Liashko had claimed in the Rada that Mr. Kliuyev had offered him $50 million to ensure that his parliamentary faction would refrain from voting to strip him of a deputy’s political immunity.

Among those believed to have been bought off by Mr. Kliuyev, as reported by theinsider.ua, was the Rules Committee’s acting chair, Pavlo Pynzenyk of the People’s Front party, who resisted repeated efforts to make stripping Mr. Kliuyev’s immunity possible.

At the May 29 committee meeting, Mr. Pynzenyk tried to appeal to both sides, approving the procurator general’s request to strip Mr. Kliuyev of his immunity yet citing a lack of evidence that would legitimize the request.

That didn’t appease Mr. Kliuyev’s enemies, led by Messrs. Liashko and Sobolyev, as well as Rada First Vice-Chair Andrii Parubii, who forced a new meeting the next week.

At the same time, Ukrainian law enforcement authorities floated numerous possible criminal charges against Mr. Kliuyev in the press. Among the most ominous was his possible role in the murder of Oleh Kalashnikov, the Party of Regions national deputy killed in mid-April.

Mr. Kalashnikov complained to those close to him that he was owed large sums of money by Mr. Kliuyev and Serhii Lyovochkin – the former Presidential Administration head – for organizing protests for the Party of Regions, Internal Affairs Minister Arsen Avakov, who called both politicians in for questioning in relation to the murder, revealed on May 28.

The Rules Committee, meanwhile, on June 2 mustered six out of nine votes to put Mr. Kliuyev’s immunity up for a vote in the session hall, which got the support of 287 deputies the next day. Parliament also voted to remove the political immunity of National Deputy Serhii Melnychuk, the founder of the Aidar battalion who is accused of such crimes as stealing thousands of automatic rifles.

In presenting the charges against Mr. Kliuyev, First Deputy Procurator General Volodymyr Huzyr cited the Kliuyev brothers’ 2007 acquisition of a majority stake in a Zaporizhia factory that he alleged was gained via abuse of authority and fraud. The factory was then used to conduct a series of financial schemes that led to its bankruptcy, even after the Kliuyevs had received a 250 million euro loan from a state bank.

Then as first vice prime minister, Andrii Kliuyev allegedly misappropriated 250 million hrv (about $31.25 million at the time) – that had been earmarked in the state budget for low income families and the disabled – to pay the interest on the 250 million euro loan, Mr. Huzyr said.

For this offense he faced charges of fraud and misappropriation of state funds.

As important as the stripping of immunity was the need to make an arrest, given that the Procurator General’s Office couldn’t act without Parliament’s permission.

But Mr. Pynzenyk, the head of the parliamentary Rules Committee, and Rada Chair Head Volodymyr Groysman, ignored Mr. Sobolyev’s requests to put the oligarch’s arrest on the agenda for a vote, the Samopomich deputy wrote on his Facebook page on June 1, two days before the vote removing immunity.

That drew outrage from other national deputies during the June 3 session.

“What is this crap? Here’s one of the main bandits of the Yanukovych regime, who organized the ‘titushky,’ financed the Anti-Maidan and had Mezhyhiria registered under his name,” said National Deputy Yurii Levchenko of the Svoboda party, referring to Serhii Kliuyev.

“By the way, these episodes aren’t in your submission for some reason. You’re only charging him with loan fraud, and not pursuing his detention or arrest at that! He’ll flee tomorrow,” he continued. “So this is a smokescreen and a plain and simple deceit of Ukrainian society. You’re making some public relations for yourselves, we all vote for this and he flees tomorrow! What’s going on here?”

Sure enough, just hours after having his immunity stripped, Mr. Kliuyev traveled to Kyiv Boryspil Airport in order to fly to Vienna, where he has a house and where he’s transferred all his Ukrainian assets, reported National Deputy Serhiy Leshchenko on his Facebook page. But the border service prevented him from boarding the flight.

The next day, Mr. Kliuyev didn’t appear for questioning at the head investigator’s office of the procurator general, where he was to be presented with criminal charges, Mr. Leshchenko reported.

What followed was scenes that could have been pulled from Keystone Cops, the bumbling policemen in silent films of the early 20th century.

First, the Internal Affairs Ministry announced on June 8 that it didn’t know Mr. Kliuyev’s whereabouts and announced he was being sought.

Within hours Vasyl Vovk, the chief investigator under the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), said his agency was not searching for Mr. Kliuyev and that the Internal Affairs Ministry could have made a “technical error.” (President Petro Poroshenko requested Mr. Vovk’s dismissal on June 19.)

Then the Procurator General’s Office got involved, issuing a search warrant for Mr. Kliuyev and submitting it to the SBU. It also submitted a request for his arrest the same day to the Rada.

The next day, June 9, the SBU confirmed it received the search warrant, but by then it was too late. Svoboda Party Deputy Head Yuriy Syrotiuk, citing an anonymous source, tweeted that afternoon that Mr. Kliuyev flew out of Kharkiv on a charter flight the prior night.

And the procurator general’s request for detention and arrest – reportedly submitted to Parliament on June 8 – didn’t become official until June 16, the day before Mr. Gerashchenko confirmed that Mr. Kliuyev was in Russia.

Besides the official criminal charges, journalists estimated that the Kliuyev brothers’ financial machinations through numerous schemes have cost the state 15 billion hrv, or at least $1.875 billion.

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