Big Construction, State Property Fund, National Bank, State Special Communications Service and others: who leaked high-profile cases of top corrupt officials in NABU?
BusinessCensor has gathered information about the "leak" of a large-scale NABU investigation into thefts at the "Big Construction". The matter concerns other investigations as well. For a long time, one of the NABU’s senior officials informed the defendants in criminal cases about the details of the investigation, warned them about searches, and saved them from prison.
On 22 May, officers of the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAPO) searched the homes of NABU detective Valerii Poliuha and former head of the Brovary District State Administration Heorhii Birkadze.
The reason for the searches, which also involved National Police officers, was the discovery of the fact that the NABU investigation into thefts during road repairs during the Big Construction was "leaked".
It turned out that information about the investigation was leaked directly to the person involved - a former advisor to the Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regional offices of the RS(M)A (Regional State (Military) Administration), curator of the Big Construction project, and businessman Yurii Holyk.
In this case, the Unified State Register of Court Decisions contains only one publicly available decision of the Appeals Chamber of the High Anti-Corruption Court on the complaint of Holik's lawyer, who tried to cancel the arrest of two iPhones and a laptop seized from Holik during a search of his car in May last year.
The text of the ruling recounts the main plot of the case:
Since March 2022, Valentyn Reznichenko, head of the Dnipropetrovsk RS(M)A, and Andrii Kolomoiets, head of the Housing and Construction Department of RS(M)A, have been in charge. "rapidly increased the amount of funding" for the maintenance of local roads.
Taking advantage of the peculiarities of procurement during the war, they made major purchases for road repairs through one contractor, Budinvest Engineering LLC.
In six months, from March to September 2022, the regional administration paid Budinvest Engineering LLC UAH 1.356 billion, which is 65% of all budget funding for the maintenance of local roads in the Dnipropetrovsk region. This is much more than the state spent on repairs in all other frontline and de-occupied regions in the same period.
"Budinvest Engineering withdrew the money received from RS(M)A to related companies with signs of fictitiousness. As noted in the text of the ruling, the LLC formally belonged to the trustees of Holik and Reznichenko.
Valentyn Reznichenko and Yurii Holyk have a long history of cooperation. Reznichenko is a relative of Borys Lozhkin, the former head of the Presidential Administration of Petro Poroshenko. Borys Lozhkin is the owner of Ukrainian Media Holding, Reznichenko was the holding's manager for a long time, and Yurii Holyk has been working on advertising projects for Lozhkin. When Lozhkin became the head of the Poroshenko Administration, Valentyn Reznichenko was appointed head of the Zaporizhzhia and then Dnipropetrovsk Regional State Administration (RSA). In each of these regions, Yurii Holyk was close to Reznichenko as his freelance adviser.
In 2019, Zelenskyy fired Reznichenko from the post of head of the RSA, but after Holik took a job as a consultant for "Big Construction", Reznichenko was reinstated.
Later on, Valentyn Reznichenko's girlfriend, fitness trainer Yana Khlanta, became the owner of Budinvest Engineering LLC, a company that has historically been involved in road tenders of the Dnipropetrovsk Regional State Administration and Dnipro City Council.
In addition to Khlanta, the firm's other long-term owners are Pavlo Chukhno and Dmytro Litnarovych.
Pavlo Chukhno, according to the Nashi Hroshi website, is the vice president of the local basketball club Prometheus. The club is owned by reputable businessmen Volodymyr and Leonid Dubinskyi, who are wanted by the FBI for alleged real estate fraud.
In November 2022, journalists of the Shemes and Ukrainska Pravda publications published an investigation into large-scale tenders for roads in the Dnipropetrovsk region for a company owned by a close friend of the head of the Dnipropetrovsk Regional State Administration.
Despite this publicity, Budinvest Engineering continued to receive large road repair contracts by inertia for some time. In February 2023, Volodymyr Zelenskyy finally decided to dismiss Reznichenko from his post. The NABU conducted searches at his and the coordinator of the Big Construction project, Yurii Holyk's places. No one was detained.
Subsequently, Yana Khlanta withdrew from the ownership of Budinvest Engineering, and her share was reassigned to Pavlo Chukhno.
Since 2017, Budinvest Engineering has spent UAH 7.94 billion from the budget on roads in the Dnipropetrovsk region.
The last time the company was awarded a tender for asphalt paving was in January this year: for almost UAH 30 million, it undertook to restore asphalt at the facilities of municipal enterprise Teploenergo of the Dnipro City Council.
In the complaint against the phones seized from Holyk, his defence lawyer noted that Yurii Holyk was not an employee of the Dnipropetrovsk RS(M)A or Budinvest Engineering LLC, and therefore could not be involved in the investigated events with the tenders. He pointed out that Holyk ceased activities as a freelance adviser to the head of the Regional State Administration in July 2019, and that Budinvest Engineering LLC has been carrying out road repairs since 2017.
However, the court denied the lawyer's request, noting that the circumstances described in the law enforcement officers' motion "reasonably indicate the presence of signs of an illegal act".
And it was the contents of Holyk's phone that confirmed the leak of information about the progress of the investigation against him.
Birkadze, Uhlava and a series of fugitive high-ranking officials
According to Yurii Nikolov, editor of the Nashi Hroshi website, law enforcement officers found screenshots of other correspondence in Holyk's phone, which referred to the progress of the NABU investigation into Holyk. Detectives found out that the person who sent the screenshots to Holyk was the former head of the Brovary District State Administration, and now a political scientist and economist, "positive expert" Heorhii Birkadze, who broadcasts the position of the Presidential Office on various issues at the Unified Telethon. Recently, he had a slip of the tongue on air that UAH 37 billion had been "stolen" from the fortifications.
Birkadze received messages on his mobile phone from an informant in the NABU that disappeared after 10 seconds. He had to use his other phone to send this information to Yurii Holyk. Birkadze took photos of this correspondence with another phone and sent them to Holyk. These photos of Birkadze in Holyk's phone were later found by security guards.
Holyk was informed through Birkadze by someone who had access to various segments of the NABU's activities.
Detectives found out that the leaks of the Holyk case had been going on for a long time. They began when Artem Sytnyk was director of the NABU and continued under the current director, Semen Kryvonos. "The information is large-scale. The detectives figured out that it was neither Sytnyk nor Kryvonos. But it is a senior NABU official. And then Uhlava ( ed. Hizo Uhlava has been the first deputy director of the NABU since April 2015) wrote a letter of resignation at his own request. I hope that the investigation will be carried out and the perpetrators will not just be removed or fired, but will go where the person who leaked the information should go," Nikolov says.
Vitalii Shabunin, head of the Anti-Corruption Action Centre, emphasizes that Kryvonos removed Uhlava from the post only after the case of information leakage became public, at Uhlava's own request. However, before that, the NABU had been conducting an internal investigation for two weeks following the statement of the whistleblower detective, and the NABU Director had not made any personnel decisions.
He suggests that Kryvonos may also be influenced by the fact that both he and Uhlava appeared as part of the landing in Ukraine of former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.
Uhlava, who has been a Ukrainian citizen since 2015, previously worked for the Georgian prosecutor's office and for some time held the position of deputy chief prosecutor in Georgia. In 2014, he came to Ukraine as a consultant as part of a team of Georgian reformers. He worked in the group that was responsible for implementing anti-corruption legislation.
From 2015 to 2016, Kryvonos served as the First Deputy Head of Odesa Customs. There, he implemented the Open Customs Space anti-corruption project aimed at eliminating smuggling schemes. It was during this time that Mikheil Saakashvili was the head of the Odesa region.
Later, in 2020-2021, Semen Kryvonos worked for the NGO "Office of Simple Solutions and Results" Saakashvili's NGO.
However, Shabunin is pessimistic about the prospects of the Holik case, which has long been a case of a major figure in the case: "If the leak has taken place, then (...) there is no point in waiting. If we warn Holik that there is an ongoing investigation, some details will be mentioned. Even without details: "Holik, you are being investigated by the NABU on the construction case". That's it, everything will be "sanitized". And it will be obvious. You come to a search, there is nothing. The defendants start behaving differently. In other words, if there was a fact of leakage, we should not expect Holik or those above him to be punished for the largest corruption scheme. This investigation has fallen apart. I think that's what angered the detective who became the whistleblower of this story," Vitalii Shabunin said in an interview with NV radio.
In recent years, information leaks in top corruption cases have certainly occurred. Before the arrest, the defendants in major corruption investigations managed to flee abroad: former head of the State Property Fund Dmytro Sennychenko fled, National Bank Governor Kyrylo Shevchenko left the country before being served with a notice of suspicion, and former Deputy Head of the Presidential Office Andrii Smirnov was released on the eve of the opening of criminal proceedings for illicit enrichment of UAH 15.7 million.
Just as unexpectedly, on 20 November, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal ordered the dismissal of Yurii Shchyhol, the head of the State Special Communications Service, and his deputy. A few hours later, the NABU served them with a notice of suspicion of organizing a scheme in public procurement.
