Another MIA representative denies testimony against Yury Lutsenko

Mykola Soroka, an officer of the MIA Department of Investigative Intelligence, was questioned on Tuesday as witness in the trial against former Minister of Internal Affairs, Yury Lutsenko. He rejected his former testimony written down in the Prosecutor’s Office protocols.

Lutsenko’s counsel, Oleksy Bahanets asked Soroka why with each interrogation he had given even more testimony against the former Minister and said that seemingly Lutsenko had given the instruction to employ driver Prystuplyuk.

Soroka: “Lutsenko? That was not the case. Lutsenko did not personally give me such an instruction”.

He added that he had made an assumption that Lutsenko might have given an instruction to the head of the staffing department, but stressed that he was presuming that this could have been the case.

When asked by Bahanets whether he had said at the interrogation that Lutsenko had carried out a “staffing purge” at the MIA, Soroka replied saying that he had not given such testimony and that those were not his words.

To this Lutsenko responded: “This is already the third testimony based on falsified protocols of the Prosecutor General’s Office”.

Soroka also said that all MIA drivers had worked in the MIA Department of Investigative Intelligence, explaining that the drivers needed to have access to all the places that the Minister was linked with. He said that the driver of the former Minister Bilokin had also worked in the department.

Previously MIA officers Yury Koshets and Serhiy Shumylo stated that Leonid Prystuplyuk had been employed in the MIA without any infringement of legislation.

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.