Yet another witness testifies in Yury Lutsenko’s favour

Another witness in the trial of former Minister of Internal Affairs, Yury Lutsenko has dissociated himself from evidence supposedly given during the pre-trial investigation.

Serhiy Levchenko, former Head of the MIA Department of Investigative Intelligence, stated in court on Friday that he had not told the investigators that Lutsenko had instructed him to provide his driver, Leonid Prystyuplyuk,

“At the pre-trial investigation I did not say that Yury Lutsenko told me to employ and give a flat to Prystuplyuk”.

He said he had not read the protocol, but simply signed it, saying there had been no doubt, he had already spent 4-5 hours being interrogated.

The protocol states that the questioning took no more than an hour, which Levchenko says is not true. He says that the interrogations always took a long time, and the last one, over around 5 hours, was at the weekend.

He also confirmed testimony from previous witnesses that drivers of Lutsenko’s predecessors and deputy ministers had worked in his department since they needed access to State secrets.

He also said that he had signed documents which led to other employees of the department getting flats, not just Prystuplyuk.

It is becoming hard to keep track, but Friday’s two witnesses bring to around 9 the number who have rejected statements supposedly made under interrogation and asserted that Lutsenko did not in fact give any instructions, and that in any case it was standard procedure for drivers of the Minister and his deputies, to work in the above-mentioned department.

Judge Vovk, however, rejected Yury Lutsenko’s application to have the investigators summoned. Lutsenko accused them of falsifying testimony.

One of the alleged offences for which Lutsenko has been held in custody for 9 months is explained in the Legal Monitoring of the Danish Helsinki Committee on Human Rights. The driver in question is, of course, Leonid Prystuplyuk.

Articles 185.4, 191.5 and 365.3, excess of authority with grave consequences for in the period
from 2005 to 2010 with the intention to inflict extra costs and losses to the State and in
agreement with his driver to have facilitated the driver's promotion to a series of police
functions, respectively Operational Attorney, Police Captain and later Police Major and Minister
Counselor, without the driver meeting the employment conditions or fulfilling these functions,
and later to have prompted him awarded early enhanced pension, extension of pension seniority
and assigned an official apartment which was reserved for other staff groups, by which he
inflicted the state a total loss of approx. UAH 600, 000.

New information from http://pravda.com.ua/news/2011/10/7/6645660/