Former Supreme Court judge Oleksandr Prokopenko, who was suspected of bribery by the NABU on May 19 (sources told Babel that it was Prokopenko who was involved), on May 16 re-registered an apartment for his son, a NABU detective Bohdan Prokopenko.
Lawyer Tetyana Kozachenko wrote about this on Facebook, citing the detectiveʼs declaration.
The apartment in Kyiv with an area of 127 m² and a parking space is estimated at UAH 1.6 million. The detective lived in it with his wife for free for several years and declared it. And just a few days before the suspicion, the father gave the apartment to his son.
NABU responded that this detective was not part of the investigative group investigating the corruption case in the Supreme Court and did not have access to the case materials. To investigate the reasons for the re-registration of the property, the Bureau is conducting an internal investigation.
Also on the day the former judges reported the suspicion, the NABU head Semen Kryvonos signed a decision to seize this property. The bureau sent a corresponding request for its seizure to the court.
What is this?
In May 2023, NABU and SAPO reported that they had uncovered a corruption scheme in the Supreme Court. Among those involved was the then-Chairman of the Supreme Court Vsevolod Knyazev, who was caught taking a record $3 million bribe.
NABU said that the case is related to decisions in favor of businessman Kostyantyn Zhevaho in the case of the Poltava Mining and Processing Plant. Zhevaho bought the plant in 2002, but the former shareholders of the company decided to appeal the purchase and sale agreement for 40.19% of the shares.
At first, the court refused to satisfy the claim, but in 2022 the appeal overturned this decision and declared the agreement invalid.
The case then went to the Supreme Court, which in April 2023 decided to leave Zhevaho 40% of Poltava Mining and Processing Complex. The investigation claims that the businessman bribed judges to obtain this decision.
The press service of Kostyantyn Zhevaho told Babel that the shareholder of “Ferrexpo” has nothing to do with this situation, and the information that the bribe could have been given by people who acted in the interests of the businessman is false.
They state that the Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court adopted a resolution dated April 19, 2023, which recognized the legality of the acquisition of the Poltava Mining and Processing Complex by “Ferrexpo” in 2002, not in the interests of Zhevago, but "in the interests of a large, public company with respectable shareholders, which is traded on the main floor of the London Stock Exchange".
On May 19, NABU and SAPO reported new suspicions in the case of large-scale corruption in the Supreme Court: three current judges and one retired judge. Babelʼs sources told us that these are judges of the Grand Chamber Ihor Zhelezny, Iryna Hryhoryeva and Zhanna Yelenina, as well as Oleksandr Prokopenko, who has been retired since 2024.
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