Yesterday, the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) searched the wife of the former chairman of the board of NJSC Naftogaz Ukraine Andrii Kobolev, lawyer Svitlana Panaiotidi.
Kobolev and his wife wrote about this on their Facebook pages, Ukrainian News Agency reports.
Kobolev noted that the search was allegedly carried out as part of an investigation into some crime committed before 2019.
"SBI investigators at around 6:30 in the morning physically broke into our house without a court order, motivating their actions by the need to protect evidence from destruction for an alleged crime that was allegedly committed in the period BEFORE!!! 2019," Kobolev wrote.
During the search, 2 mobile phones were seized, one of which belonged to Kobolev, his wife's computer, and 2 old electronic devices.
"As a result of the relentless actions of this newly created law enforcement agency, the SBI employees (3 people inside and an unspecified number of people outside) stole (for some reason they wrote "seized" in the report) two mobile phones (and the investigators themselves confirmed that they believe that one of them belongs to me, not my wife, to whom they supposedly came to search, not to me), my wife's work computer, which contains materials with attorney-client privilege (because she is a practicing attorney), and 2 more old electronic devices, to which neither she nor I remembered the passwords," Kobolev noted.
He and his wife consider this search illegal.
"The entire procedure of this illegal search took about 5 hours, during which we listened to many interesting explanations why SBI investigators can conduct searches of lawyers without a court decision and contrary to the norms of the Code of Criminal Procedure (for example, without involving a representative of the Bar Council). What struck me, unfortunately, experienced in such procedures, was not so much the legal ignorance of the group leader, but his audacity and self-confidence. It struck me because I had already seen this. In 2010, when Yanukovych's eagles were gluing the case of Yuliya Tymoshenko. The handwriting is the same. Like a tracing paper," Kobolev says.
Panaiotidi noted that she experienced stress during the search.
As Ukrainian News Agency earlier reported, the court began considering the merits of the case of Kobolev, who in 2018 awarded himself a USD 10 million bonus. The case concerns Kobolev's receipt of a bonus of about UAH 260 million in the spring of 2018. Former Chairman of the Board of Naftogaz of Ukraine Kobolev is accused of initiating the consideration of the issue of approving the payment of a bonus by the Supervisory Board of Naftogaz of Ukraine in 2018. Later, Kobolev prepared amendments and additions to the proposal for the payment of a bonus for extraordinary achievements, setting himself the amount of the bonus at USD 10 million. At the same time, Kobolev purposefully concealed from the members of the Supervisory Board and the Nomination and Remuneration Committee information about the maximum amount of bonuses based on the results of work.
Recall that Kobolev transferred all his mother's money to the United States so that it would not be taken away by the Ukrainian investigation.
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