The National Anticorruption Bureau of Ukraine opened a criminal investigation against former Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko at the request of Kyiv’s Solomyansky District Court.
NABU’s press office confirmed news reports that the court sent an Aug. 5 order to enter a case against Lutsenko into the Unified Registry of Pre-Trial Investigations, which NABU did. Lutsenko still served as General Prosecutor at the time, having signed a letter of resignation on Aug. 29.
Lutsenko is under investigation for criminal abuse of office. NABU did not confirm any other details.
According to the court order, a complainant alleged the former general prosecutor’s abuse of power to former Rada chairman Andriy Parubiy in October 2018. The complaint found its way to NABU in February 2019, but the body had not entered the complaint into the pre-trial registry. The August court decision forced NABU to act.
The former prosecutor is currently in the U.K. — his spokeswoman, Larysa Sargan, said he traveled there on Sept. 29 to take English language lessons for next month and a half.
It’s unclear if the new investigation has anything to do with Lutsenko’s ties to the growing scandal over attempts to pressure President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating the Biden family. Lutsenko is widely credited with having sparked the scandal by trying to curry favor with the U.S. and spinning baseless conspiracy theories to Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
In recent weeks, Lutsenko backpedaled from his allegations, telling media that there was no reason to investigate the Bidens and that he saw no evidence of wrongdoing.
The State Bureau of Investigations on Oct. 1 had opened a separate criminal case against Lutsenko. Servant of the People party head David Arakhamia had told media that this Investigation was related to Lutsenko’s alleged ties to illegal gambling businesses. Lutsenko dismissed the allegations on Facebook, calling them ridiculous.
The Kyiv District Administrative Court also opened a case against Lutsenko and the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine at the end of August, following a lawsuit by former Kyiv mayor Leonid Chernovetsky, who asked the court to ban Lutsenko from traveling abroad.
Separately, the news site Vesti on Oct. 15 reported that the High Anti-Corruption Court asked NABU to launch an abuse of power investigation against Lutsenko for allegedly falsifying documents while investigating Oleksandr Klymenko, the former Minister of Revenue and Duties under Viktor Yanukovych. NABU did not immediately confirm this information.
