The Specialised Antiсorruption Prosecutor's Office has sent to court an indictment against MP Oleksandr Trukhin. He is accused of attempting to bribe patrol police officers.
In August 2021, the MP offered law enforcement officers a bribe of 150,000 unspecified monetary units for leaving the scene of an accident without hindrance. The SAPO press service does not name the person, but the details provided make it possible to identify him as Trukhin.
"On 7 September 2022, he was notified of suspicion under Part 1 of Article 369 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine," the prosecutor's office said.
On 28 September, the investigation was completed and the case files were made available for the defence for review.
Trukhin is charged under Part 1 of Article 369 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, which he means he can be fined 1,000 (UAH 17,000) to 4,000 tax-free minimum incomes, or imprisoned for two to four years.
The incident involving the Servant of the People MP occurred on Boryspil highway on 23 August 2021. Six people were injured, including two children and the head of the Referees Committee of the Football Federation of Ukraine. A number of media outlets claimed that Trukhin was driving the Audi which crashed into the Ford (which, in turn, crashed into the Daewoo), but later deleted these reports.
On 2 October, Prosecutor-General Iryna Venediktova said that nothing was being concealed in this case. On 1 February, Ukrayinska Pravda published a video of an accident Trukhin. In the video, Trukhin tells the policeman "let me go quietly into the forest" and then promises to "talk" with Interior Minister Denys Monastyrskyy.
After the video was published, the head of the faction, Davyd Arakhamiya, called on Trukhin to leave the faction on his own. Arakhamiya said that he and his colleagues were waiting for "official and convincing results of the investigation into the accident".
The Interior Ministry also released a statement, saying that "all attempts to present the essence of the case in such a way that allegedly Ukrainian MP O. Trukhin tried to 'negotiate' something with the Ukrainian Interior Ministry are not true".
On 2 February 2022, Trukhin was expelled from the Servant of the People party. Trukhin did not leave the faction until 7 September. After he was declared a suspect in September this year, Trukhin was assigned a measure of pre-trial restraint in the amount of 49,600 hryvnyas.