• Is Ukraine blocking Swiss investigation of Yatsenyuk ally?
    http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/is-ukraine-blocking-swiss-investigation-of-yatsenyuk-ally-398159.html

    A powerful Ukrainian lawmaker facing a criminal investigation by Swiss law enforcement is being protected from prosecution by Ukrainian authorities, lawmakers allege.

    Member of parliament Serhiy Leshchenko, who is part of President Petro Poroshenko’s dominant faction, sounded the alarm over the case at the Yalta European Strategy forum in Kyiv on Sept. 12.

    He asked why Mykola Martynenko, deputy head of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front faction, had not been ousted from his post as head of parliament’s energy committee or even investigated in Ukraine, despite Switzerland having launched a criminal investigation into him on suspected bribery.

    Martynenko, widely believed to handle finances for Yatsenyuk’s faction, faces bribery accusations by Swiss prosecutors in a case that has been kept secret for nearly two years.
    […]
    Ukrainian authorities may have good reason for playing down the investigation: Swiss journalists reported that Martynenko accepted bribes from Skoda JS, a nuclear engineering company that positions itself as Czech-owned but is actually part of Russia’s OMZ engineering group – which is controlled by Kremlin-run Gazprombank.

    Martynenko is accused of accepting roughly $30 million in bribes, though it was not clear how much of that allegedly came from Skoda JS.

    Swiss newspaper Sonntagszeitung cited Swiss prosecutors as saying in March that Martynenko is suspected of taking bribes from Skoda JS in 2013 in order to grant the company a contract for the maintenance of nuclear reactors in Ukraine.

    Skoda JS and Ukraine’s #Energoatom signed a memorandum of understanding on the deal last October, prompting some criticism from experts in nuclear energy.

    With this contract, the government in Kyiv wanted to create the impression among its people and the European Union that Ukraine had begun to depend on the West in the nuclear sector,” Yan Haverkamp, an expert on nuclear energy at Greenpeace, was cited as saying by Ukrainian media.