The director general of Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation (SBI), Oleksi Sukhachev, has warned that the latest searches and raids on 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 has passed, and passed a long time ago,» Sukhachev has emphasized in the press release provided by the SBI.
Sukhachev stressed that the latest actions against high-ranking state officials «are only the beginning,» the fruit of the SBI’s work «over a long period of time,» and that they have only just begun to inform the population about the steps being taken to combat corruption.
«This work did not stop even after the beginning of Russia’s large-scale aggression,» said Sukhachev, who has noted that the war created among some a certain «illusion» that the fight against corruption would take a back seat.
«The SBI never forgot for a moment that corruption is no less dangerous an enemy for Ukraine than Russia. (…) If someone still hasn’t figured it out, so much the worse for them. Now there is only one way: to work for and for victory,» the SBI director has emphasized.
This Wednesday, the Ukrainian authorities carried out a series of raids on several 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 few hours, the entire leadership in charge of Customs has been dismissed, as well as the house of oligarch Igor Kolomoiski in the city of Dnipro has been searched, and the former Minister of Energy Igor Nasalik is suspected.
Ukraine has been the scene in the past of numerous corruption cases and Transparency International ranked it 122nd out of 180 in 2021 in its corruption perception survey. 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.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
