On Tuesday, 30 May, the government approved the appointment of Oleh Kiper as head of the Odesa regional state administration, Taras Melnychuk, a representative of the government in parliament, has said on Telegram.
Kiper started working in the prosecutor's office in 2001. He worked in Odesa and Ivano-Frankivsk regions, and in recent years in Kyiv. He was the deputy head of the Main Investigation Department of the Prosecutor-General's Office under Viktor Yanukovych.
In 2014, Kiper was included in the list of persons prohibited from holding public office under the Law on the Purification of Government. However, Kiper obtained a court ruling that his vetting was "unfounded".
On 11 September 2020, Kiper was appointed head of the Kyiv city prosecutor's office.
In February, journalists of the Skhemy project found out that Kiper had gone abroad for the New Year and Christmas holidays, where he spent a total of 10 days. He left Ukraine on 29 December 2022 through the border with Poland and returned on 8 January 2023.
In a commentary to journalists, he confirmed that he had gone abroad on holiday, explaining it as "family circumstances", but refused to name the country where he had been on holiday. He explained this by security reasons, as "his wife changed her Russian citizenship to Ukrainian in the summer". At the same time, the journalists found that at the time of publication, the Russian authorities listed the Russian passport of the wife of Kyiv prosecutor Iryna Kiper as valid.
In March 2023, Maksym Marchenko was dismissed as the head of the Odesa regional state administration.