The NACP records conflicts of interest when appointing examinations in criminal proceedings of NABU detectives against high-ranking officials, but refrains from checking them. This is evidenced by the response of the corruption prevention agency to a request by UNN.
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The request was about whether the NACP conducts checks on who NABU detectives order forensic examinations from. In particular, whether the NACP conducted an investigation into NABU senior detective Viktor Yarema, who ordered forensic examinations from a company registered to the daughter of his former colleague from the Rivne Regional Prosecutor's Office. The conflict of interest in this case was identified by the NACP itself, but the audit was never conducted.
In response to your request regarding the verification of forensic examinations appointed by the detectives of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine as part of the pre-trial investigation, we would like to inform you that as of the date of this response, the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption has not conducted such verifications,
Meanwhile, it is the detectives' manipulation of examinations that leads to acquittals of their clients.
This was the case in the closed cases of Rotterdam+ and the ex-minister Volodymyr Omelyan, who has already been acquitted. According to lawyer Iryna Odynets, the NABU lost in court because during the investigation , detectives in these cases "drew" forensic examinations in friendly private offices and then manipulated them.
This is likely to be the case in the case of former Minister of Agrarian Policy Mykola Solskyi, in which NABU detectives ordered an expert examination, and when they realized that it was likely to be in Solskyi's favor, they tried to refuse it through the court, but to no avail.
Given the repeated facts of such manipulations, the idea of NABU head Semen Kryvonos to create his own expert institution for the bureau looks extremely alarming. In this case, there may be many more "painted" examinations, and thus NABU investigations may turn into biased persecutions similar to the mass political terror of the Soviet NKVD.
This was also emphasized by foreign experts who audited the NABU. The auditors believe that the creation of a criminal institution at the Anti-Corruption Bureau will not solve the issue of the objectivity of examinations in criminal proceedings investigated by detectives.
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The day before, it became known that even the NABU leadership is trying to manipulate the examinations to prove their innocence in the scandal. Thus, the first deputy director of the NABU, Gizo Uglava, was invited to take a polygraph at the bureau, but he decided to take it elsewhere.
Uglava is involved in one of the internal investigations into the alleged leakage of information from the NABU. The director of the bureau suspended him from performing his duties for the duration of the pre-trial investigation.
We would also like to remind you that the NABU's budget is increasing every year, but the bureau is not trusted by the majority of Ukrainians.