A former official of the State Service of Ukraine for Food Safety and Consumer Protection, who was notified of suspicion in March this year, will be tried in Dnipro Region. The woman systematically extorted bribes from her subordinates. It was possible to document her receiving bribes totalling about UAH 3.5 million.
This was reported by the Prosecutor General's Office.
‘Prosecutors of the Dnipro Regional Prosecutor's Office sent to court an indictment against the former director of the regional laboratory of the State Service of Ukraine for Food Safety and Consumer Protection on the facts of extortion and receipt of illegal benefits on a particularly large scale (parts 3, 4 of Article 368 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine),’ the prosecutors said.
Over the past year, the accused set up a scheme to receive bribes from subordinate employees of veterinary and sanitary medicine laboratories in Dnipro city and region.
In return for the bribe, the official promised not to arrange inspections and not to dismiss the laboratory workers from their positions. She also received a bribe from one of the veterinarians for transferring him to another position.
In total, the accused received UAH 3.5 million in illegal benefit. During the authorised searches, almost UAH 1.8 million in various currencies, draft records of the amount of the bribe, mobile phones and documentation were seized.
The accused is currently in custody.
In early April, officials of the State Service of Ukraine for Food Safety and Consumer Protection in two regions were exposed as earning millions of hryvnias every month from agricultural exporters. Officials of the service in Odesa and Zaporizhzhya regions organised a corruption scheme to extort money for issuing phytosanitary certificates required for the export and import of agricultural products, as well as for the production of inspection reports required for the export of barley and corn.