Court denies request to extend investigation of Pavlo Vovk

Ukraine’s independent High Anti-Corruption Court ruled
on Jan. 6 to deny a request by investigators to extend their investigation into
the criminal cases against scandalous judge Pavlo Vovk and his fellow judges,
who are accused of creating a criminal organization and illegal seizure of
power. The ruling is “a serious threat to the case considering it can’t be
appealed. So the case will either be halted, or the pretrial investigation will
conclude earlier, having been left incomplete,” said in response to the
Anti-Corruption Action Centre on its Telegram channel. The officials with the
National Anti-Corruption Bureau requested two more months in their
investigation, which concludes on Jan. 17.

The reason the NABU request to extend the
investigation was denied is because of a lack of grounds, the anti-corruption
court said on its website on Jan. 11. “Evidence is lacking of a summons being
issued” by investigators, the statement said. “The individual who informed the
judge of the summons, during which the suspect sat in a car, truly threw two
sheets of paper into the car. Yet the court didn’t gain evidence that these sheets
were a summons. Also not understood is the contents of these two sheets of
paper.”

Judge Pavlo Vovk, the head of the Kyiv District
Administrative Court, didn’t show up for his detention hearing on Jan. 12,
anti-corruption court spokeswoman Olesia Chemerys told the pravda.com.ua news
site. The hearing was postponed until Feb. 3.

Zenon Zawada: Apparently,
an important criminal case, involving an influential figure and significant
evidence, is under threat of being undermined owing to procedural violations by
investigators and/or lawyers. So even after the arduous and expensive work of
getting anti-corruption institutions in place, Ukrainian authorities are still
falling short of meeting their professional requirements. The
inability to prosecute Pavlo Vovk, with the significant evidence apparent,
will harm Ukraine’s image in terms of combating corruption and being a safe
place to do business.