A specialized court in Ukraine has accepted a request by anti-corruption prosecutors and ruled to place the ex-chief of the country's special communications agency in custody, setting his bail at 25 million hryvnyas ($687,000).
Yuriy Shchyhol, the chief of Ukraine's State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection (SSSCIP), was fired by the government on November 20 when he was officially declared a suspect in an investigation into the embezzlement of 62 million hryvnyas ($1.72 million).
Ukraine's Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAP) and the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) said in a statement that Shchyhol was one of six suspects into the investigation of the purchase of information systems intended for the creation of a network of protected data registers in 2021.
The SAP on November 22 announced that the anti-corruption court agreed with the joint SAP and NABU request to keep Shchyhol in custody.
Earlier on November 22, the SAP reported that the anti-corruption court also ruled to hold in custody the alleged organizer of the fraudulent scheme regarding the purchase of information systems, whose bail was set at 50 million hryvnyas ($1.375 million).
The suspect's identity was not made public by the SAP, but Ukraine's Anti-Corruption Center named him as entrepreneur Roman Koval.
Anti-corruption prosecutors allege that during 2020-2022, Koval, in collusion with Shchyhol's agency, developed a fraudulent scheme to seize budget funds allocated for the purchase of equipment and software.
According to the investigation, a procurement contract went to a company controlled by "the organizer of a criminal network that supplied software to a an enterprise called Ukrainian Special Systems, which belongs to SSSCIP, at an inflated cost."
On November 4, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced new reforms aimed at boosting Ukraine's efforts to join the European Union that include a draft law increasing the powers of the SAP, a move that Zelenskiy said "should have been implemented decades ago."
In its annual progress report, the EU earlier this month recommended opening up accession negotiations with Ukraine once it meets all conditions but urged Kyiv to continue to take firm steps in the fight against endemic corruption.
