NABU and the SAPO have sent to court a case concerning the misappropriation and laundering of UAH 54.18 million from Ukraine’s state budget. This was reported by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau.
According to the investigation, in 2013–2016 a former Ukrainian MP devised and carried out a scheme to misappropriate budget funds by misleading the European Court of Human Rights in a dispute between a company controlled by the scheme’s participants, Golden Mandarin Oil LLC, and Kyivenergo PJSC.
In September 2013, a representative of Golden Mandarin Oil, acting on the defendant’s instructions, filed an application with the ECHR seeking to recover UAH 54.18 million from the state budget. It was allegedly a debt owed by Kyivenergo under a court ruling that had not been enforced since 2009.
Detectives established that, at the time of the application to the ECHR, the company had taken no steps to actually recover this debt. Its assets and accounts had been seized to secure obligations to Rodovid Bank totalling more than UAH 70 million. In addition, the company’s director had been held criminally liable for fraud involving financial resources.
According to the investigation, the defendants also concealed from the ECHR the fact that the right to claim against Kyivenergo had been assigned to another company. On the eve of applying to the court, UAH 54.18 million had already been received for that right.
NABU’s statement does not name the main suspect. However, it is known that the key organiser of the scheme is former MP Heorhii Lohvynskyi.
Subsequently, according to investigators, Lohvynskyi, by agreement with the then leadership of the Ministry of Justice, ensured that the Government Agent before the ECHR prepared a declaration on a friendly settlement of the dispute.
The document effectively acknowledged the state’s liability for failure to enforce a court decision in a dispute between two private companies, even though the right to claim under that decision had already been transferred.
After that, UAH 54.18 million was transferred from the state budget to a company controlled by the defendants and their accomplices.
Subsequently, according to investigators, the funds received were laundered through conversion centres.
- Lohvynskyi is suspected of organising a scheme under which a company controlled by him, Golden Mandarin, received UAH 54 million from the state budget by filing a claim with the ECHR. The ruling against Ukraine was issued under the friendly settlement procedure — that is, Ukraine itself acknowledged its fault. In the prosecution’s view, Lohvynskyi and other figures deliberately misled the court. In addition, in 2024 the ECHR declared Golden Mandarin Oil LLC’s complaint inadmissible due to the latter’s abuse of its right to apply to the court.
- Lohvynskyi became the seventh suspect in the case.
- In March 2020, NABU applied to the European Court of Human Rights asking it to clarify whether Lohvynskyi had protection from criminal prosecution and, if so, to lift it. At the time, his wife Hanna Yudkivska was serving as an ECHR judge, and the closest relatives of the court’s judges are protected by immunity.
- The ECHR then refused to lift Lohvynskyi’s diplomatic immunity. Later, the former MP tried, through manipulations involving the clarification of the ECHR’s decision, to protect other suspects in the Supreme Court, but the proceedings on Lohvynskyi’s complaint were closed.
- On 13 June that same year, the Appeals Chamber of the High Anti-Corruption Court returned the case for a new hearing. At the time, the panel of judges agreed with the prosecutor’s arguments that the suspect was on an international wanted list.
- On 30 October 2024, the High Anti-Corruption Court for a second time refused to order Lohvynskyi’s arrest in absentia because, in the court’s view, although the notice of suspicion is sufficiently substantiated for the purposes of applying a preventive measure — which is the minimum threshold — it is not sufficiently substantiated to apply detention in custody. The parties then appealed the decision again. The repeat appellate review lasted from November 2024 to May 2025.