Employees of the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) served Timur Nishnianidze, an associate of ex-Odesa Governor Mikheil Saakashvili, a notice of suspicion in an embezzlement and abuse of power case late on March 9.
Prosecutors questioned Nishnianidze on March 10, while Kyiv’s Pechersk Court was scheduled to decide on arresting him at 7.30 p.m.
The alleged crimes took place when he was Georgia’s consul in Odesa in 2007 to 2012.
Last year prosecutors and the SBU also searched Odesa Oblast’s administration, accusing Nishnianidze of getting illegal value added tax refunds.
Nishnianidze was an informal advisor to Saakashvili in charge of cutting government staff as part of his reforms in Odesa and heads For Odesa’s Good, a charity fund. He believes the case to be a political vendetta by the authorities against the former governor’s team.
Saakashvili has become a vocal critic of President Petro Poroshenko since he resigned as governor in November.
Yulia Marushevska, another Saakashvili ally and former customs chief of Odesa Oblast, said on March 3 that the Prosecutor General’s Office and the SBU were searching her apartment and that of her former subordinate Roman Bakhovsky.
Marushevska said the searches were part of an investigation into her customs reform initiatives that State Fiscal Service Chief Roman Nasirov interpreted as corruption. She said she saw the case as retaliation by Poroshenko to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau’s corruption case against Nasirov, who is currently under arrest.
She also said on Feb. 8 that SBU Deputy Chief Pavlo Demchyna, a protégé of Poroshenko’s grey cardinals Ihor Kononenko and Oleksandr Hranovsky, had asked the National Agency for Preventing Corruption to investigate her over an $18 bonus that she awarded to herself.
Meanwhile, Davit Sakvarelidze, who used to be the chief prosecutor of Odesa Oblast under Saakashvili, has faced criminal cases related to the arrest of two top prosecutors in 2015 and the spending of U.S. funds on prosecutorial reform.
Last year the police also opened an investigation against Sasha Borovik, then a Saakashvili advisor, for re-posting a Facebook post that allegedly offends Ukraine’s national symbols.
