The Metropolitan Court of Appeal is a place where destinies are put on stream.
Hearings are scheduled every 20 minutes, materials often do not have time to be delivered from district courts, parties are late, judges are delayed, and alarms completely block work.
Among the dozens of people whose destinies here turn into production units for this conveyor belt is a reserved gray-haired man, dressed pointedly simply, in jeans and a sweater. He takes care of his posture, his movements are smooth, his voice is quiet. In the courtroom, in front of him, he places a notebook with evenly written handwritten lines.
In a conversation with the UP, this person will repeatedly repeat: “I am a doctor.” And it will sound both proud and justified.
This is the director of Kyiv maternity hospital No. 6 Sergei Tsemashko. He is in court because the prosecutor's office is asking to remove him from work. The reason is serious charges. Tsemashko is suspected of organizing the theft of budget funds.
But the surreality (that is, the detective nature of a book) of this story is that he himself informed the law enforcement officers about the scheme that the doctor is accused of.
According to his statement, in the spring of 2022, the police began to investigate the “dead souls” in the temple of life. In one of the episodes, the investigation has already been completed.
It is being considered by one of the district courts of Kyiv, located on the Left Bank. Here, destinies also become statistics, but not because of an excess of attention, but because of its absence.
A building that may seem half empty. Parties to the trial not accustomed to media attention. Computers that freeze.
Two maternity hospital workers who became “scapegoats” are being tried here. They were the lowest link in the history of the “dead souls” and, most likely, only followed the instructions of their leaders. However, they are so far the only ones whom the police have brought final charges against as a result of the investigation.
But at the end of the summer of 2023, another body - the newly created Bureau of Economic Security - came for Director Tsemashko. Now he is being blamed for the “dead souls” scheme.
The finale in this case, it seems, is not soon.
But even now, this story perfectly illustrates how, in pursuit of popular and socially expected reports on the fight against corruption, law enforcement officers can neglect the thoroughness and detail of their work.
How, behind the beautiful phrases from press releases that journalists and society look back on, there may be at least a slightly different reality hidden. How the fight against corruption becomes a field for competition between investigative agencies.
Man and manicurist. How the director of a Kyiv maternity hospital found “dead souls” in his hospital
Mid-March 2022. Russian troops were stationed near Kyiv. Many government and municipal institutions provided life in the capital with limited resources around the clock. Maternity hospital No. 6 was like that.
Sergei Tsemashko headed it a year and a half before the big war, in the summer of 2020. And he set out to implement reforms.
The fact that at the time of Tsemashko’s arrival the working conditions of the hospital were unsatisfactory, and the new director brought positive changes, was not only told by UP himself. This was partially confirmed by several employees who found themselves on the other side of the manager in a criminal conflict. And also an interlocutor in the Kyiv government who is not involved in this conflict.
“There was a so-called commercial department, where individual doctors with experience and regalia had access, and women of VIP status gave birth there,” recalls Tsemashko and lists other problems of the maternity hospital:
— The requirements of the sanitary-epidemiological regime were not met; there was not even disposable underwear. The material and technical base was at a very low level; women gave birth on an examination chair because there were not enough transformable beds. There were a lot of unnecessary examinations that did not comply with the protocols.”
On a military evening in March 2022, Sergei Tsemashko was looking through bank transactions on salaries:
“And already on the letter P I saw the same last names, but different initials. And it confused me."
The last name, which was duplicated in the statements, coincided with the data of the woman who was responsible for calculating wages in the maternity hospital. However, the director was not familiar with the name.
Arriving at the accounting department in the morning, Tsemashko found out that this unknown person was the worker’s husband. He did not perform any work at the hospital, but budget funds were transferred to his name every month.
“Then employees who have been working for a long time say: “This last name doesn’t work for us either, or this one worked in another department.”
So, more than a dozen “dead souls” were exposed in the hospital. A commission was formed from employees, in particular from the accounting and legal departments, and an internal investigation was launched.
“And I started writing to the chief accountant, deputy for economics, and head of the personnel department. They were not on site, they worked remotely. I wrote to them: give me information, give me explanations,” says Tsemashko.
In a conversation with the UP, he does not name the names, only the positions of the workers. But from a cached version of the hospital's website, it's easy to see who they're talking about.
These are the head of the HR department Natalya B., who worked at the hospital for 10 years, the deputy director for economic issues Anzhelika V., whose experience has already reached 19 years, and the chief accountant Irina S. - the only one of the three who came during the time of the new director .
“Should I quit?” — the accountant immediately asked.
“I don’t know anything about this,” Deputy Tsemashko assured.
The HR officer did not answer the manager's calls.
Subsequently, an internal audit counted only about 5.4 million hryvnia in losses. And the official investigation named the same three leaders responsible for the device of 17 “dead souls”.
All three were reluctant to communicate, and some did not respond to the commission at all. After the completion of the internal investigation, all three resigned according to their own statements.
And the director wrote a statement to the police. Then, in May 2022, law enforcement officers began to investigate the scheme. The investigation found among the fake workers, for example, a manicurist.
And on recordings from cameras near ATMs, investigators saw three women withdrawing money from the cards of such “manicurists.” Several hospital workers told UP that the staff recognized the same three bosses from these recordings.
A few months later, the first suspects appeared in the case. These are two women who ran the clinical diagnostic laboratory - Alena M. and Tatyana B. They were the lowest link in the scheme.
“After the internal investigation, the director did not fire us, he said that we were great specialists and that everything would be fine. “Give your testimony, you will be like witnesses.” But the prosecutor came, and literally in 10 hours we went from witnesses to accused,” recalls one of the defendants in a conversation with the UP.
Alena and Tatyana were responsible for signing the time sheets, on the basis of which budget funds were allocated. Before this, report cards had to go through 4 levels of certification: from the senior officer in the department to the director.
The heads of the laboratory do not deny that there were “dead souls” in their department. Women talk about this as a long-standing tradition in medical institutions. And that fighting it means risking your own place.
But the most important thing. Both defendants are sure that their management could not have known who was signing the salaries:
“I would like the person who is really guilty to be punished. Why should I? I didn’t see this money.”
These women consider not only the three already named officials guilty. But also the director himself. They claim that they gave such testimony both to the commission at the hospital and to the official investigation. But the testimony against the director, according to doctors, was not included in the protocols.
In addition, the laboratory workers pay attention: “dead souls” worked not only for them, but also in the administration of the institution. During the trial, this was already officially confirmed by one of the members of the commission conducting the internal investigation.
And if we compare the amount of losses, in the exposed laboratory they are three times less: 1.3 million versus 4.1 million hryvnia in other positions ignored by the police.
In September 2022, the case against the laboratory assistants, who essentially became scapegoats, was sent to court.
And only after that the suspicion was handed over to the head of personnel. In absentia, because two days before the suspicion the woman left Ukraine for Poland. Natalya B. is now wanted.
Only the police officially consider her the organizer of the scheme with fake laboratory assistants.
UP was able to find contact between Deputy Director Angelica V. and the lawyer who represented her in a civil lawsuit against the hospital. However, the woman’s personal number is not accessible, and the lawyer said that he no longer communicates with the former client.
How a whistle-blowing director became a corruption suspect. And who didn’t
“On January 4, 2023, at about 10 o’clock in the morning, I was in the office, the doctor was seeing me. And then BEB employees come in, with witnesses, with cameras. I didn’t know yet that it was BEB. I offered them tea and coffee, because I was already used to the police coming to us,” Sergei Tsemashko recalls how, 8 months after the start of the police investigation, he first saw detectives from a different structure.
ESB - Bureau of Economic Security, created in 2021 to investigate economic crimes. Its head is part of the pool of law enforcement officers who focus on the Office of the President. The body itself was repeatedly involved in demonstrative “raids”, for example, after corruption scandals in the Ministry of Defense.
The search at the hospital continued until late in the evening. At the same time, they searched Tsemashko’s apartment:
“Then I began to understand that something uncertain was happening. I even asked the detective: “Do I need a lawyer?”
The police and BEB had already “competed” for the cause of “dead souls” before.
It was first transferred to the Bureau back in August 2022. But after a short trip through the offices, the materials returned to the police, and BEB opened its own production.
“They simply took all the materials from the police, added three interrogations of legendary workers, where there was a set of gossip. There are no people who testify specifically against Sergei Vasilyevich,” says Tsemashko’s lawyer Sergei Zhilich.
According to the defense, approximately two-thirds of the case against the director is copied police work:
“The case does not require any special investigation, the police have already done everything there, found the dead souls, interrogated them - no one said a word about the director.”
After the first search, the BEB remained silent for another six months. Tsemashko was not even interrogated. And already on August 31, 2023, he was served with suspicion. Unlike the police, BEB found its organizer of the theft scheme - the director.
The Office of the Prosecutor General, which is overseeing the BEB case, asked the court to ban Tsemashko from visiting the institution and suspend him from work. However, he was refused. And only then, almost two weeks after the suspicion, the Bureau publicly reported the case on its website.
“The head of the medical institution involved his subordinates and acquaintances in the illegal scheme... Illegal payments from the budget were transferred to the bank cards of the “employees” and then distributed among the defendants,” says the Bureau’s official press release.
According to the BEB investigation, the director entered false data into orders for the appointment of employees, work time sheets, and statistical reporting.
“This is an interesting point that the investigation does not want to see. Some of these workers were registered for work even before Sergei Vasilyevich appeared, not only in the position, but in general in the maternity hospital,” his lawyer points out.
In addition, in court, the prosecutor, explaining why the director should not be allowed to go to work, recalled that the investigation had not yet found the orders described above for the appointment of “dead souls.”
“Some of the signatures on bonus orders were forged, an examination determined this,” says the director himself. “I tell the prosecutor: “Yes, the signatures are forged!” He replies: “You could have asked people to sign for you to create an alibi for yourself.”
Tsemashko himself, like his ordinary employees, also points to the three fired executives as being responsible for the dead souls. None of them are suspects in the BEB case, in which detectives were already able to name the alleged organizer, but did not begin to concentrate on the perpetrators.
The director is confident of his innocence. He claims that he could not know all 300 people who work in his hospital, and the time sheets that he signed had been certified by several other people before him.
Tsemashko repeats: “I am a doctor,” and cannot explain why three of his subordinates successfully escaped prosecution.
UP contacted the Bureau of Economic Security with a request for comment. They only answered that the investigation was ongoing, and its details were a secret by law.
The Attorney General's Office, which is overseeing the case, did not respond to the UP's request for comment before the material was published.
***
This is not a story about corruption in one hospital. Moreover, it’s not about how a million hryvnia was stolen from the laboratory.
Ordinary women workers are on trial. The director who contacted the authorities with evidence is under suspicion.
All the rest are either successfully hiding or have no complaints from the security forces.
“It turns out that the initiative is punishable,” smiles one of the three judges who decides whether Tsemashko should be suspended from work.
Regardless of whether those who were caught up in the investigation are guilty, this is a story about how law enforcement officers share the stars among themselves for exposing corruption, putting on the conveyor belt loud press releases and fighting statistical errors, and not corruption as a system.
