Head of UKROP party detained on kidnapping suspicions; his allies outraged (UPDATED)
▻http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/ukrop-party-claims-its-head-korban-detained-by-sbu-401057.html
Gennady Korban, Dnipropetrovsk businessman and head of the recently founded UKROP party, was detained in Dnipropetrovsk by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) on the morning of Oct. 31. The offices and homes of his associates were searched.
SBU and Prosecutor General’s Office confirmed they were conducting a large-scale joint operation against an organized crime group in Dnipropetrovsk.
“There is no political component in this case,” SBU prosecutor Vladyslav Kutsenko said at a briefing in Kyiv on Oct. 31. “We don’t care which political party the suspects represent.”
UKROP has called the arrest and the searches an act of “political repression.”
Korban is suspected of kidnapping several people during his time as deputy governor of Dnipropetrovsk in 2014-2015 and is facing eight to 15 years of prison. One of them, according to the investigators, was Oleksandr Velychko, a director of the law department in Dnipropetrovsk City Council, allegedly kidnapped to force a change of the city’s mayor back in 2014.
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Korban, a Dnipropetrovsk businessman and a renowned self-admitted corporate raider, launched UKROP party in 2015 with a financial support of his friend, Ukraine’s second richest oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky.