Oleh Hladkovsky, a former defense official implicated in a Hr 250 million graft scandal in March, was arrested on Oct. 17 near Kyiv after he had unsuccessfully tried to leave the country.
The National Anti-Сorruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) confirmed the arrest on charges of abuse of office but didn’t disclose additional details.
According to a Kyiv Post source, Hladkovsky’s arrest was tied to an investigation of a state defense contract that might have benefitted Hladkovsky’s car manufacturing company, Bohdan Motors. In 2016, the Defense Ministry ordered military trucks from Bohdan Motors in an apparent conflict of interest.
According to another source familiar with the case, the price of the trucks was inflated. After the contract was signed and 80 percent of it was paid out, the parties allegedly signed an addendum to the contract, raising the price. Most of Ukraine’s defense procurement takes place in secret, and doesn’t become a matter of public record. The ministry sustained significant financial losses, which prompted the indictment.
Bohdan ordered the vehicles in a semi-completed state from Belarusian company MAZ before putting on the finishing touches — and its brand.
Hladkovsky was an appointee of ex-President Petro Poroshenko, and his former business partner.
The businessman reportedly tried to fly out of Ukraine via Boryspil International Airport near Kyiv but was denied exit. NABU detectives reportedly arrested him at a restaurant near the airport shortly after. According to a source in the prosecutor’s office of Ukraine, the arrest was done in haste because the NABU was alerted when
Hladkovsky tried to leave the country.
Hladkovsky released a statement protesting his “politically motivated” detention through Bohdan’s press service and announced that he was going on a hunger strike. The company added that he was on his way to the Bus World 2019 trade show in Brussels as the company’s representative and was not trying to flee the country.
“Over the past half year, as I returned to the Bohdan corporation, I left the country tens of times to participate in talks with business partners and I always returned to Ukraine,” Hladkovsky stated.
The arrest is a show of progress in an ongoing investigation of massive fraud in Ukraine’s defense sector. The investigative program Nashi Groshi exposed an alleged scheme in
February, based on the text messages leaked to its journalists.
The report accused Hladkovsky’s son Ihor of leading an operation to smuggle Russian military parts to Ukraine and sell them to Ukrainian defense firms at inflated prices, along with his associates, Vitaliy Zhukov and Andriy Rogoza. The parts, many of which were of poor quality or defective, were allegedly later used in the war zones of the Donbas region.
Analysis of the messages between the partners revealed that Hladkovsky junior was exploiting his father’s authority to push the deals through. One message implied that Hladkovsky senior was getting a cut of the profits.
The report criticized NABU and other law enforcement agencies for closing investigations into the alleged scheme over the years.
The elder Hladkovsky, a friend and business partner of Poroshenko, had been the first deputy secretary of Ukraine’s National Defense and Security Council and the chairman of the Inter-Departmental Commission on Military Technical Cooperation and Export Policy. Poroshenko fired him from both positions in March after the revelations went public. Poroshenko said in interviews that he had not spoken to Hladkovsky since then.
The expose contradicted Poroshenko’s assertions that Ukraine had weaned itself off Russian imports for military parts. According to the report, the Kuznya on Rybalsky shipping plant, previously owned by Poroshenko, was involved in the scheme, doing further damage to Poroshenko’s already-faltering reputation shortly before the March presidential elections.
All of the accused men subsequently denied the allegations against them.
NABU launched an investigation shortly after the report was published. However, Nashi Groshi found that the scheme had been investigated multiple times before and that almost every law enforcement agency in Ukraine, including NABU, helped cover up the corruption, allegedly due to bribes.
According to the investigative program, a NABU detective may have been bribed to take one of the companies involved in the scheme off the list of firms banned from dealing with Ukroboronprom.
Artem Sytnyk, the head of NABU, denied that the bureau made such a list, despite evidence to the contrary. However, the bureau still fired two detectives who had been mentioned in the Nashi Groshi report.
