You're reading: Lutsenko says searches underway at Kharkiv hotel where Kernes lives, and in house of Dobkin’s mother

The searches are conducted at the premises belonging to the Kharkiv Mayor Hennadiy Kernes, and mother of the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada deputy Mykhailo Dobkin of the Opposition Bloc faction in Kharkiv since this morning, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yury Lutsenko told the Ukrayinska Pravda newspaper.

“The searches are being conducted in Kharkiv since 07.00 a.m. today, dozens are planned. A total of 100 officials of the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office and the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) arrived in the city,” he said.

He said that the searches are underway as part of a criminal investigation into plotting the theft of 654 ha of Kharkiv’s land in the amount of Hr 4 billion.

“The city government is suspected of organizing this theft. The searches were also conducted at the National Hotel [where Kernes lives],” he said.

“The officials went to conduct searches at the house of Dobkin’s mother, but he arrived and showed his official residential registration, and this is the residence protected by the deputy’s immunity in accordance with the law,” he added.

Moreover, he said “another defendant in the criminal case put up resistance, and the Alpha special forces unit arrived at the site.”

The Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada deputy from the People’s Front faction and an advisor to Ukrainian interior minister, Anton Gerashchenko, said that the files on violation in Kharkiv’s land sector, in particular, schemes with allotting the land, had been collected a long time ago.

“There is a law, under which lands have to be allotted via an auction, in force in Ukraine for a long time. However, they found the loopholes to evade this procedure and allotted over 600 ha of Kharkiv’s land to the various front persons and then the land was sold in secondary market,” he said on the 112 TV channel on Sept. 15 morning.

He said that in this case the files of the criminal proceedings, which allowed the Prosecutor General’s Office to obtain the court decision to conduct the searches, were collected. “Subsequently, if there will be enough evidence, then, I am confident, certain public officials were be suspected,” he said.

At that, he said that Kernes was not suspected of an additional count and he is still a suspect in a case of kidnapping of two Euromaidan activists. “If he is suspected of other counts, there will be another case and a court will find him guilty. In this case he will be dismissed from the post of Kharkiv mayor in several months or years and new elections should be scheduled there. But taking into consideration that our justice is administered not that fast, one cannot say that it will happen in a week or a month,” he said.

To the question of a possibility and initiating to deprive Dobkin of his parliamentary immunity, Gerashchenko replied that this issue is under the Prosecutor General’s jurisdiction.