Mystery of Ukraine’s Richest Man and a Series of Unlikely Suicides
▻http://www.newsweek.com/2015/04/17/ukraine-plagued-succession-unlikely-suicides-former-ruling-party-320584.ht
Feuding oligarchs are battling to retain or increase their influence in the new order, and their lieutenants are turning up dead.
Melnychuk was a prosecutor in the southern port town of Odessa, governed by Kolomoisky ally Ihor Palytsia. He is just one of at least eight officials appointed by the Yanukovych regime, ousted by pro-democracy protesters in February last year, to die in mysterious circumstances over the past three months.
And Ukraine’s law enforcement doesn’t want to talk about them.
When Melnychuk’s body was found on 22 March, police initially told local journalists he had committed suicide. But it soon emerged that alarmed neighbours had called police on hearing of a late-night struggle. Pathologists found he had been badly beaten before the fall. Later the same day, Odessa prosecutors registered Melnychuk’s “suicide” as a murder, and arrested a former police officer they describe only as “citizen K”.
In reply to a legal request by Newsweek for information on investigations into the deaths of seven other former officials, all tied to Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, the General Prosecutor’s Office responded that all the information about all the deaths was a state secret – a staggering claim to make about a series of apparently unrelated civilian deaths they told the press were suicides.
After an intervention by the Presidential Administration, the General Prosecutor’s Office disclosed that four of the seven deaths are being investigated as murders, with another investigation as yet unclassified. The two remaining cases had been closed with no evidence of a crime. No other information was provided.
At the heart of this murder mystery is one wealthy businessman in particular – 48-year-old billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man with a fortune estimated at $7bn. A former lawmaker for the Party of Regions (rebranded as the “Oppositon Bloc” for the current parliament) he retains serious clout in the country through his purchasing power and long-standing allies in law enforcement and parliament.
“Ahkmetov was the grey cardinal of the Party of Regions,” says Dmitriy Gnap, an investigative journalist for Ukrainian TV channel Hromadske who has spent more than a decade reporting on the oligarch’s activities. “Yanukovych was the official leader, but Ahkmetov was the man who controlled all the financing, all the political actions of the party.”
Ukraine’s new government has opened numerous criminal probes into those political actions, but with several of those who knew most about Akhmetov’s activities now dead, they can never be compelled to testify in court.
