The Prosecutor General's Office conducts searches of Ukraine's largest oil company
On April 5, the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine (GPU), together with the Security Service (SBU), began searches of the PJSC (public joint stock company) Ukrnafta. 50% + 1 share of Ukrnafta belongs to Naftogaz of Ukraine (NAK), and 42% of shares are held by Ihor Kolomoyskyi and Gennadiy Bogolyubov, who are former shareholders of PrivatBank [the largest bank in Ukraine, which was nationalized at the end of 2016].
The press service of Ukrnafta said that searches are being conducted in the central office of Ukrnafta and its regional offices in Boryslav, Pryluky, Poltava and Okhtyrka. The searches are related to the oil auctions of 2013-2015.
According to the company’s press service, "Since the beginning of the pre-trial investigation, no investigative actions have been conducted, and the GPU has never submitted a request to the company for information or documents."
"It should be noted that today the Prosecutor General's Office is seizing documents, most of which have already been provided to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Kyiv city prosecutor's office within the framework of similar criminal cases, which indicates the inconsistency of the work of law enforcement agencies and the duplication of functions. Such actions by the Prosecutor General's Office look like an unjustifiable competition between investigative bodies," the company believes. Ukrnafta also assured that the company's employees comply with the requirements of the Pechersk court's rulings and provide the required documents in full.
Later, an employee of the GPU, Dmytro Pavliy, talked with journalists near the Ukrnafta building. He explained that the searches conducted by the GPU do not concern the cases investigated by the National Security Service and the Kyiv prosecutor's office. Also, Pavliy noted that searches might last for several days.
"We will continue to work, and it is possible not just for one day, because the building is large and there are many documents," he said. According to Pavliy, searches are also taking place in six structural divisions in other regions of Ukraine.
Larisa Sargan, Press Secretary for Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, said on her Facebook page that the searches in Ukrnafta are part of criminal proceedings regarding abuses by company officials that caused the company losses of about 140 million hryvnia. According to Sargan, during the investigation it was discovered that raw materials were mainly sold to the enterprises that were part of the Privat group. Therefore, the managers of Ukrnafta, acting in the interests of these enterprises, deliberately provided the Auction Committee with information on the density of oil that did not match the real characteristics. "Ultimately, this led to an underestimation of the volume of each lot of extracted raw materials put up for sale, and pulled down the cost preliminarily, causing Ukrnafta losses of almost 140 million hryvnia," said Sargan.
"At present, the investigators of the General Prosecutor's Office, with the support of the Security Service, are conducting searches on the office premises of Ukrnafta with the aim of finding documents that have the value of physical evidence in criminal proceedings," the spokeswoman said.
Political expert Yulia Komarova said on the news channel NewsOne that the searches at Ukrnafta indicate that the company's management should change soon.
"We have repeatedly been convinced that such actions precede the fact that the management is simply changing to a representative of a competing financial and industrial group," the expert explained her point of view.
According to her, if the Prosecutor General's Office has taken up this matter, then during the searches some important documents were indeed found that indicate the presence of criminality in the work of the enterprise. Komarova is also convinced that the searches in Ukrnafta are a war between the oligarchs.