MADRID, 1 Feb. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The general director of the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) of Ukraine, Oleksi Sukhachev, has warned that the latest searches and raids this Wednesday, as well as the dismissals of senior government officials for possible corruption, are “just the beginning” and that “there is still a lot of material” to investigate.
“The time when it was possible to rob the state with impunity and undermine its combat readiness is over, and it is long overdue,” Sukhachev stressed in the press release provided by the SBI.
Sukhachev has stressed that the latest actions against high-ranking state officials “are just the beginning”, the result of the work of the SBI “over a long period of time”, and that they have just begun to inform the population about the steps that are being taken to combat corruption.
“This work did not stop even after the start of large-scale Russian aggression,” said Sukhachev, who has noted that the war created an “illusion” among some that the fight against corruption would take a backseat.
“The SBI never forgot for a moment that corruption is no less a dangerous enemy for Ukraine than Russia. (…) If someone hasn’t figured it out yet, so much the worse for them. Now there is only one way: to work for and for victory”, emphasized the director of the SBI.
This Wednesday, the Ukrainian authorities have carried out a series of raids on various public bodies, including the Ministry of Finance, as part of a campaign against corruption that has already led to the arrest of a deputy defense minister and dozens of dismissals.
In the last hours, the cessation of the entire leadership in charge of Customs has been carried out, as well as the search of the house of the oligarch Igor Kolomoiski in the city of Dnipro, and the former Minister of Energy Igor Nasalik is suspected.
Ukraine has been the scene in the past of numerous cases of corruption and Transparency International placed it in 2021 in 122nd place out of a total of 180 in its study on the perception of corruption. The fight against these crimes is also one of the key demands of the European Union (EU) in the framework of the process for its possible accession to the bloc, something firmly rejected by Russia.