Former Deputy Prime Minister of Crimea Vitaly Nakhlupin, sentenced in Russia to 8 years in prison for a large bribe, received a new sentence, this time in Ukraine.
Nakhlupin was sentenced in absentia to 12 years for high treason, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
According to the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office of the “Autonomous Republic of Crimea”, which has gone down in history, as a deputy of the Supreme Council of Crimea, Nakhlupin voted for the All-Crimean referendum, approved the resolution “On the Declaration of Independence of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol” and the further entry of Crimea into the Russian Federation.
All this, according to Ukrainian prosecutors, was supposed to disguise the fact of occupation of the peninsula by the armed forces of the Russian Federation, and there was no expression of the people’s will, and the Crimean deputies, when making decisions and resolutions, violated the law, since the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine had terminated their powers by that time.
At the time of the events of the “Russian Spring” of 2014, Nakhlupin headed the budget committee of the Crimean parliament. After the winter holidays, he returned with a broken leg after an unsuccessful skiing trip at a foreign resort. They say that the decision of the leadership of the Crimean parliament on the referendum caused Nakhlupin a personal protest - he came to Crimea as part of the team of “Makeevka” Prime Minister Vasily Dzharty, but after the death of the latter he decided to stay on the peninsula, but not to lose contact with Donbass.
Therefore, the desire of Crimea to disconnect from the Maidan Ukraine was not part of Nakhlupin’s interests, but after the appearance of “polite people,” the parliamentarian’s views changed, and his colleagues who returned to Makeyevka, by a strange coincidence, began to disappear or commit suicide.
The current head of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, was Nakhlupin’s deputy in the budget committee, and during the formation of the new government of Crimea, he thanked his former patron with the post of Deputy Prime Minister for Federal Target Programs and road construction. Nakhlupin did not appreciate the gratitude; in 2018 he was detained on suspicion of receiving a large bribe.
The investigators charged him with receiving, through intermediaries, a bribe worth more than 16 million rubles for winning tenders for 28 positions in federal and regional programs. The investigation was unable to prove Nakhlupin’s own bribery until the deputy prime minister’s right hand, Yaroslav Slivka, cooperated. He told how, on behalf of his boss, he accepted “gratitude” from businessmen. For assisting the investigation, Slivka received a 6,5-year suspended sentence.