Ukraine Monitor presents the latest news concerning internal and external matters of Ukraine – a unique country where the interests of the East and the West clash almost every day.
Date: 12 May 2023 Author: Grzegorz Kuczyński
Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Agency Detains Odesa Mayor
Odesa Mayor Hennadiy Trukhanov has been detained in a corruption case. Investigators accuse Trukhanov of embezzling money from the city budget. Both he and his deputy were detained at Kyiv airport. The mayor’s problems with law enforcement agencies began several years ago. Perhaps the authorities in Kyiv seek to demonstrate they are capable of tackling corruption proactively.
Trukhanov is either to be detained for 60 days or pay 13.4 million hryvnias in bail. If failed to pay the bail, Trukhanov was charged with the obligation to arrive at each request to the court, not to leave the territory of Ukraine without the permission of the court, to notify the court of a change of place of residence and to work, to refrain from communicating with persons specified in the court order, to deposit a passport and to wear an electronic bracelet. The case involving both Trukhanov and Pavel Vuhelman, his deputy, has been pending since the second half of the past decade. The Odesa mayor is accused of embezzling over 92 million hryvnias ($2.5 million) of budget funds while purchasing Odesa’s Krayan factory building for the city government at an inflated price. The prosecution alleges that the mayor of Odesa acquired the premises of a bankrupt factory, called Krayan, at an inflated price, thus misleading the city council. In 2021 the case was reopened by the High Anti-Corruption Court of Ukraine and has been under consideration by the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAP). The mayor and his team were first acquitted of the charges back in 2019. Notorious for his pro-Russian sympathies, after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Trukhanov, who has been mayor of Odesa since 2014, acknowledged his view of Russia had changed drastically. He pledged to defend the coastal city and criticized Russia for its war crimes in Ukraine. With more than one million inhabitants, Odesa is Ukraine’s third-largest city. It is also the country’s largest port.
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