Judge Khripun in the service of Alliance Bank

The High Council of Justice is due to consider the resignation of the head of the Northern Economic Court of Appeal Oleg Khripun one of these days. The judges reproached the undeclared estate for 30 million UAH, but instead of punishing him for illegal enrichment, he decided to retire to an honorable pension in order to receive funds from taxpayers for life.

However, on the eve of his resignation, Oleg Khripun, as part of a panel of judges, managed to make a scandalous decision, which actually “divided” the state company Ukrenergo for more than 1 billion UAH - money that could have been used to repair destroyed energy infrastructure, purchase spare parts, and maintain networks .

Scandalous Thinner

Judge Oleg Khripun is not well known to the general public. But business knows much more about him. After all, for the last 23 years, Oleg Alekseevich has worked in the system of economic courts that consider economic claims of companies against each other. Until 2011, he worked in the Economic Court of Kyiv, and then moved to the Kiev Economic Court of Appeal, which then became the Northern Economic Court of Appeal (NACC). Oleg Khripun headed this institution even before the revolution of dignity - in May 2013. And since then he has never left his office. If not for a full-scale invasion, this servant of Themis would obviously have served as a judge under the sixth president in a row.

However, despite not yet reaching retirement age and the opportunity to earn a considerable judicial salary and other bonuses from working in the justice system, judge Oleg Khripun submitted his resignation to the High Council of Justice in early September of this year. For an ordinary observer this would hardly evoke any emotion. However, in legal circles and among fellow judges, this move caused great outrage. In the spring, Khripun got into a small but loud scandal. A team of Bihus.info journalists filmed a story about how the judge does not declare his use of the estate for 30 million UAH, in which his ex-wife lives, and the estate itself belongs to his ex-mother-in-law. Khripun stated that he allegedly does not use this property constantly, but periodically visits his ex-wife, which is why he “is here.” Consequently, he insisted that he did not know how and why to declare this estate. At the same time, he did not have any housing of his own except the rented one. “It is very difficult for judges to work in modern conditions, in those conditions when every day, from every screen, on every website, we only hear which judges are bad,” Khripun told reporters then.

The story did not receive wide resonance. However, the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption nevertheless undertook to check the lifestyle of the judge at the request of the editorial lawyers. The results were not publicly announced. However, it is likely that the journalists were on the right track and pressed on one of Khripun’s painful calluses. After all, just a few weeks after the release of the relatively innocent story, a number of legal publications, as if on cue, were already distributing an openly ordered video about the assistance of the judges of the Northern Economic Court of Appeal, headed by Oleg Khripun, to the army.

Without diminishing the importance of every donation to help the Armed Forces of Ukraine for the sake of a speedy victory over the enemy, it should be noted that this approach can be classified as “theft” - “reputation laundering” using the theme of war. The drones that the judges purchased to transfer to the front in the amount of about 12 million UAH (a little more than a third of the value of the estate of Khripun’s mother-in-law) were called Pagsik. This is a diminutive of PAGS, an abbreviation for the court where Khripun works.

By the way, this is not the first time that a judge has resorted to PR during a war in order to distract (as it may seem) attention from major scandals. For example, after making a number of scandalous land decisions in August-September 2023, the court “suddenly” decided to open on its territory the exhibition “Together to Victory!”, where numerous thanks to the court staff from different military brigades are displayed. This is a laudable matter, but could it have been done without such a level of pathos?

Getting into the last carriage

However, judging by the fact that Khripun wrote a letter of resignation at the beginning of September 2024, “theft washing” does not help much. The High Council of Justice was supposed to consider this application on September 10, but the consideration was stopped due to numerous complaints about the work of the judge, including from public activists regarding the false declaration of property. The online newspaper Law and Business, close to the former Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration Andrei Portnov, described the situation not without sarcasm: “[VRP member] Roman Maselko intended to ask to postpone the consideration of Oleg Khripun’s application for resignation from the post of judge of the Northern Economic Court of Appeal, because and a complaint was received against him. However, the day before, the first disciplinary chamber of the VRP returned this complaint without consideration, and R. Maselko did not have time to prepare another conclusion about the judge’s resignation letter. Therefore, the issue was postponed for a week.” As of September 23, the case was still pending.

Is it because, realizing that he was getting into the last carriage, Oleg Khripun stopped being shy about promoting in the Northern Court of Appeal the interests of those who are willing to pay well for these interests. Judging by the register of court decisions, such an interested bank client turned out to be one scandalous bank, Alliance, known for its reluctance to pay bank guarantees to state-owned enterprises. So, in August, the PAGS judges, under the leadership of Khripun, began to make “copy-copy” decisions that prohibited the bank from paying money under bank guarantees issued in favor of Ukrgazvydobuvannya. There are already four such decisions on bank guarantees. There is no doubt that the decisions on the other three, the cases of which are in court, will be similar. The cost of these PAGS decisions for the state is 1 billion hryvnia.

At the same time, the chairman of the court, sitting on suitcases, listened to the arguments of representatives of the state company Ukrenergo and the Alliance commercial bank in the case of the latter’s debt to the state institution in the amount of more than UAH 1.2 billion. “Ukrenergo,” we recall, demands that “Alliance” return funds under the guarantee that the financial institution issued to United Energy, a company from Kolomoisky’s orbit. The latter, in turn, did not pay for the purchase of electricity, so the bank had to pay off the debt. A year and a half after the circumstances for payment occurred (March 2022), in September 2023, Alliance filed a lawsuit to have the guarantee declared unenforceable. At the same time, arguing the reasons for this, he referred to reports and facts that occurred after March 2022.

The court of first instance decided the case in favor of the Alliance back in April 2024. At that time, it was already known about the high-profile criminal case of the NABU on the theft of funds from Ukrenergo, as well as about the attempt of Alliance Bank lawyers from the Miller company to give a $200 thousand bribe to NABU detectives and SAPO prosecutors to change the jurisdiction for the internationally wanted chairman of the bank’s board "Alliance". The appellate court, logically, should consider the case “soberly” and without external pressure. After all, we are talking about 1.2 billion UAH. (this is the amount of Alliance’s debt to Ukrenergo, taking into account penalties and fines) - these are the funds necessary to repair critical infrastructure in conditions of constant shelling and shutdowns.

On September 17, the Northern Economic Court of Appeal, headed by Oleg Khripun, decided to again accept the bank’s invalid arguments and upheld the decision of the first instance, putting it into effect. In fact, now Alliance, which is associated with the influence of the ex-deputy head of the Office of the President Rostislav Shurma, will be able not to pay the debt. And avoid bankruptcy, towards which the bank has been rapidly moving over the past two years. That is, after the dismissal of the previous management of Ukrenergo, to which the Alliance was also attached informationally, and, it seems, financially, now its financial stability is probably no longer threatened.

The reason for this was that the court did not even begin to read into the arguments of the state company and, in fact, allowed the commercial bank to carry out this robbery in broad daylight - this is precisely what caused Khripun’s “suspended” condition. With one foot in retirement, fueling the already unstable situation in court with his resignation, Judge Khripun, together with his colleagues, actually took advantage of the fog of uncertainty to wave the right decision to the right people with the right reputation for the last time. But the catastrophic effect of its implementation is now difficult to predict. After all, if other banks and creditors also begin to refuse to pay off their obligations to the state, in violation of the law, this could lead to uncontrollable chaos in many markets and seriously threaten economic and political stability in a warring country.