The Ukrainian government should arrange for a lie detector test of all top managers at the state defense concern Ukroboronprom, President Petro Poroshenko said.
“We hereby ask the government to provide for polygraph tests of the entire top management at the state concern Ukroboronprom and to prepare separate lists of those to be tested. Please include there also heads of state defense enterprises and company directors and those responsible for financial operations,” Poroshenko was quoted by his press service as saying at a meeting with Oleksandr Turchynov, Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council , and his deputy Serhiy Kryvonos.
The test results, if they detect “these or other circumstances of a crime,” should be passed to the counter-intelligence unit of the national security service or to law enforcement agencies, Poroshenko said.
On Feb. 25 Bihus.Info, an investigative journalism website, presented a documentary claiming that Ihor Hladkovsky, son of then NSDC first deputy secretary Oleh Hladkovsky, together with Vitaliy Zhukov and Andriy Rohoza, used dummy firms to sell contraband Russian parts to defense companies at twice to four times the price. According to the journalists, the embezzlements amounted to Hr 250 million at least.
The authors of the documentary also claim that the corruption schemes involved Oleh Hladkovsky, formerly a business partner of Petro Poroshenko, who is now president, Pavlo Bukin, an ex-director of Ukrspetsexport and now head of Urkoboronprom, and directors of several other companies (including Izyum Instrument-making Plant and Morozov Design Bureau) and other Ukroboronprom officials. Deals were struck mainly through three dummy firms, one of which was supposedly Kuznya on Rybalsky which at the time was owned by Poroshenko.
On March 4, Poroshenko fired Hladkovsky as NSDC First Deputy Secretary and as chairman of the inter-agency commission for military-technical cooperation and export control.
On March 18, Poroshenko enacted the NSDC resolution demanding international audit of Ukroboronprom.
