The Prosecutor Generalʼs Office confirmed that at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, investigators of the State Bureau of Investigation destroyed part of the materials of various criminal cases. Currently, they are working there to restore the information.
This is stated in the investigation of journalist Iryna Romaliyska, published on the website of "Nastoyascheye vremia".
"We inform you that according to the information of the State Bureau of Investigation, which is at the disposal of the Office of the Prosecutor General, separate material carriers of classified information in the criminal proceedings you requested, in which the procedural management is carried out by prosecutors, were destroyed by the Office of Regime-Secret Work and Information Protection of the State Bureau of Investigation. Prosecutors in the specified criminal proceedings did not give consent for the destruction of these materials," the Prosecutor Generalʼs Office reported.
The journalist received an internal document of law enforcement agencies — a memo describing the destruction of materials in various criminal cases. It states that on the night of February 24, a few hours before the invasion, the SBI transported materials from the central office in Kyiv to Khmelnytskyi. Some of the secret materials remain in the capital, and they are being destroyed.
On the morning of February 25, the head of the Bureau, Oleksiy Sukhachev, arrives in Khmelnytskyi and signs an order to destroy the next batch of criminal case materials. Some of them are marked "Especially important".
Thus, the SBI employees destroyed materials in the "Kharkiv Agreements " case, the " army impoverishment " case, the Yakymenko case, the Medvedchuk "coal case" and several Poroshenko cases.
In general, according to this official memo, the SBI destroyed secret materials of 140 criminal cases and more than 500 materials of secret investigative actions.
Lawyers Serhii Horbatiuk, who previously headed the Special Investigations Department of the Prosecutor Generalʼs Office, and Vitaliy Titych say that this will not necessarily lead to the actual burial of these cases. Only a specific prosecutor in a specific case can say how important the destroyed materials were. However, the lack of them can at least complicate the process of proving the guilt of suspects. In addition, it is difficult to say for what purpose the SBI destroyed the materials, in particular when they were already in Khmelnytskyi — hundreds of kilometers from the front.