The offices of Poroshenko's company and sports club are being searched in connection with theft in the defense industry.
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau is conducting searches at the premises of the automobile company Bogdan Motors, as well as at the 5th Element sports club owned by Petro Poroshenko and his business partner Igor Kononenko, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“The investigative action was authorized and carried out during the investigation into the embezzlement of state property on an especially large scale by officials of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine and the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, who in 2015-2018, according to the investigation, illegally included special motor vehicles in the state defense order and purchased them according to inflated prices,” the NABU press service reported.
Preliminary legal qualification of the case - Part 5 of Art. 191 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (embezzlement on an especially large scale or by an organized group).
NABU detectives have been conducting the investigation since April 2018.
Law enforcement officers do not provide any other information due to the need to maintain the secrecy of the investigation.
The Monitor sports and fitness complex, better known as the elite fitness club “5th Element,” belongs to several joint-stock companies, and the final beneficiaries are the previous president Petro Poroshenko and his comrade-in-arms, people’s deputy Igor Kononenko.
Earlier, NABU detectives came with searches to the elite sports club “5 Element”, owned by Petro Poroshenko. However, law enforcement officers were not allowed into the premises, explaining that it was the reception room of a people’s deputy.
Petro Poroshenko’s European Solidarity party has already announced “repressions” against the ex-guarantor. And the initiator of the criminal prosecution of Poroshenko, Ukrainian lawyer Andrei Portnov, ridiculed this version.
“Poroshenko’s party said that searches in his companies are political pressure. I think this doesn’t matter at all in Poroshenko’s question. He must go through everything that he organized for others for five years. Searches, criminal cases, handcuffs, prison, pressure on friends and families, trampling of children's things with dirty shoes, pressure on friends and partners, confiscation of property, harsh media headlines and threats of street violence.
Only forward, so that you don’t have time to raise your head. Every day I have to wake up in a nightmare and remember my stupidity and arrogance,” Portnov wrote in his Telegram channel.
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