NABU announced the start of a financial investigation into Operation Midas with the involvement of foreign law enforcement officers and the State Financial Monitoring Service of Ukraine
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), after completing the secret stage and conducting searches in the Midas energy corruption case, is moving on to a financial investigation. This will require cooperation with foreign law enforcement agencies and the State Financial Monitoring Service, reportedNABU Director Semen Kryvonos.
“Imagine the transactions that took place in this ‘office’ (where the defendants discussed schemes and distributed money) and now what needs to be done? We need to track the movement of funds through state or private banks, the movement of funds abroad”, — explained Kryvonos.
According to him, available information indicates that the suspects often used cryptocurrency, which further complicates the investigation.
“We will need the help of law enforcement officers from other countries. Perhaps we will need to address the issue of creating joint investigative groups, which have demonstrated very high efficiency in corruption cases.”, — said the director of NABU.
He also stressed the importance of cooperation with the State Financial Monitoring Service, while acknowledging that the Bureau has been waiting for an “abnormally long time” for a response from this body on several sensitive cases. According to him, NABU will send a large number of requests to the State Financial Monitoring Service to establish the transactions that took place.
“The Financial Monitoring Service is a financial intelligence unit that interacts with the financial intelligence units of our other partner countries and can promptly receive cash flows and suspicious transactions that have signs of money laundering,”— the NABU director explained.
He recalled that during the documentation, it was established that about $100 million passed through the “office”, and significant amounts of funds were withdrawn abroad.
“This is what we have established operationally. It could be much more,”— he emphasized, emphasizing the importance of the financial investigation.
Kryvonos also noted that important documents were seized during the searches, which provide an idea of the movement of funds, but it is necessary to finally clarify where this money was transferred, how it was converted, possibly into real estate or other assets abroad.
The head of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAP), Oleksandr Klymenko, in turn, reported that the investigation still needs to decipher more than 30 nicknames used by participants in the schemes:
“It’s not one, not two, not three dozen. It could be officials, or just people who used the services of this “office.”
The heads of the SAPO and NABU also reported that the recordings contain conversations about the possible involvement of other law enforcement agencies in the case, but emphasized that the Security Service of Ukraine is not among them.
