Nikolai Martynenko and the Supreme Anti-Corruption Court. Four unforgettable years together

In this case, VAKS appointed free lawyers to the defendants 13 (!) times

At the end of October 2019, the High Anti-Corruption Court (HACC) combined two cases against the odious ex-People's Deputy Nikolai Martynenko and his henchmen. The production itself was transferred to the Anticorruption Court in the early autumn of the same 2019.

From then until 2022, VAKS considered Martynenko’s probable crimes in one proceeding. Until he separated them due to systematic and probably coordinated abuse of rights and delaying time on the part of defense representatives.

This led to the delay of the consideration at the Supreme Court of Justice for up to four years, and before that it was also heard for almost a year in the Shevchenkovsky District Court.

Why Martynenko is being tried, how the behavior of the defense has changed since the start of the trial at the Supreme Court of Justice, and why the court has not yet come close to a verdict - let’s look into the material.

What did Martynenko do wrong?

For the first time, Martynenko’s probable crimes were actively discussed in Ukraine in 2015. The Kyiv Post then published an exclusive: legislators claim that the Ukrainian authorities are protecting the influential Martynenko, who was then deputy chairman of the Popular Front faction, from Swiss law enforcement officers.

The Swiss prosecutor's office suspected Martynenko of receiving $30 million in bribes, in particular from representatives of the Skoda JS company, for concluding a contract for the maintenance of nuclear reactors in Ukraine in 2013. It is a Czech nuclear engineering company that is part of the Kremlin-controlled Russian engineering group OMZ. Martynenko himself then headed the fuel and energy committee of the Rada.

Swiss law enforcement officers have been investigating since 2013, at which time they turned to Ukraine for help. However, then Prosecutor General Shokin said that no statements had been received. And Martynenko, of course, denied all the accusations.

The Ukrainian investigation into the actions of Martynenko and other accomplices began in December 2015. This was one of the first really high-profile cases of NABU since the beginning of its work.

During the investigation, detectives collected a huge amount of evidence, including hundreds of volumes of the case. The evidence concerns a criminal scheme that Martynenko probably organized in two episodes: the misappropriation of funds from the State Enterprise NAEK Energoatom and the State Enterprise VostGOK.

In the first, Martynenko in 2009-2012 probably could have taken over €6.4 million by increasing the prices of tender offers for the purchase of equipment for Ukrainian nuclear power plants from the Skoda JS company. As a result, Energoatom overpaid this company $6.4 million, which was then transferred to the accounts of the Panamanian company Bradcrest Investment SA controlled by Martynenko and laundered under the guise of fees for services.

The investigation also believes that in 2013-2016, the State Enterprise VostGOK purchased uranium oxide concentrate in Kazakhstan through the Austrian company Steuermann, controlled by Nikolai Martynenko and Ruslan Zhurilo (at that time deputy director of VostGOK). More than $17 million was wasted in this way. The purchase was carried out despite the fact that the state-owned enterprise was supposed to ensure the extraction of this raw material in Ukraine.

According to the results of the investigation in this case, in addition to Martynenko himself, seven more defendants were in the dock: director of Vostok GOK Alexander Sorokin and his deputies Ruslan Zhurilo and Vladimir Bogdanets, director of Energoatom Valery Vasilkov and director of a separate division Vladimir Svyatnenko, deputy head “Naftogaz” Sergei Pereloma and representative of the fictitious company Pavel Skalenko.

History of the VACS hearing

The pre-trial investigation lasted three years, and the indictment against Martynenko reached the Shevchenko court only on May 22, 2018. There, the high-profile case was heard for more than a year, and this happened by leaps and bounds.

In the first six months, the judges reviewed half of the more than 200 volumes, and the SAP prosecutors brought the materials themselves to the hearings in boxes. The court scheduled hearings almost every week, adding them one after another, and the defense, in turn, commented on them surprisingly quickly. However, such fast work could hardly indicate the desire of both sides to quickly reach a fair verdict.

According to one version, the “turbo mode” was turned on, because the beginning of the work of the High Anti-Corruption Court, created in February 2019, was visible on the horizon. High expectations were placed on him regarding the quality of legal proceedings, and it was there that Martynenko’s case should have moved under jurisdiction.

However, despite the frantic pace, the case still managed to get to the HACS on October 2, 2019. The next day, the case materials were transferred and the composition of the judges was determined, and on October 24 they were united by materials on the accused Skalenko and Svyatnenko. At the time of their arrest, both were wanted.

According to the norms of the criminal procedure code, transferring a case to another court unquestioningly means starting the hearings from scratch, so all the “progress” achieved over more than a year by the Shevchenko court was lost.

And it is not surprising that after the start of the consideration of the case at the Supreme Court of Justice, the defense radically changed its behavior and tried in every possible way to delay the process. It got to the point that judges Fedorak, Strogiy and Maslov, who are considering the case of misappropriation of funds from the State Enterprise NAEK Energoatom and the State Enterprise VostGOK, were forced twice, in 2020 and 2021, to submit a notice of intervention to the Office of the Prosecutor General and the High Council of Justice in the activities of judges, carried out by defense attorneys.

In particular, the latest report spoke of systematic absenteeism of defense attorneys without good reason, disruption of order in the courtroom, groundless challenges, filing reports of judges committing crimes, and even a threat to file a lawsuit against judges for the protection of honor and dignity.

For your information, in this case, VAKS appointed free lawyers to the defendants 13 (!) times - often this was due to the constant and probably concerted refusals of the accused from previous lawyers.

It is interesting that one of the defendants, deputy director of Vostok GOK Ruslan Zhurilo, even mobilized into the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in March of this year. Therefore, the court separated and stopped the proceedings against him. By the way, the same thing was done in a separate case of abuses at the State Enterprise “OGKhK”, where Zhurilo, together with his deputy Yuriy Pertsev, is accused of causing UAH 300 million in losses to the state-owned enterprise by selling titanium-containing ores at reduced prices through intermediaries.

The defense's actions caused an irreparable delay in the final decision for as much as four years, and the examination of more than 300 volumes of the combined case and the questioning of numerous witnesses, which is still ongoing, raises the question of when the case will finally reach the finish line.

HACS is now trying to speed up the review process in order to meet reasonable trial deadlines. For this reason, last year two episodes were separated in the case - theft at the State Enterprise Energoatom and the State Enterprise VostGOK.

But no matter what pace the panel of judges tries to set the case, the cases against Martynenko and his henchmen are still at the stage of examining the evidence. There is still a long way to go before the verdict, because it is preceded by debates between the parties and the last word of the accused, and the law directly prohibits interrupting or speeding up the participants in the process at these stages.

Transparency International Ukraine expects a constructive consideration of the case with good conduct by its parties. The hope is that the business will no longer celebrate its fifth anniversary.

And it will be possible to observe the process and evaluate it further at the next meeting in November - after the panel of judges pronounces a verdict on ex-People’s Deputy Alexander Onishchenko and his “financial director” Elena Pavlenko in the famous “gas case”.