By Anastasiia Malenko and Tom Balmforth
KYIV (Reuters) – Ukraine detained one of its four deputy energy ministers and three other suspects as they were caught “red-handed” receiving a tranche of a $500,000 bribe, state prosecutors and anti-graft police said on Monday.
Ukraine has stepped up a wartime campaign against official corruption to prove the country’s credentials for joining the European Union, which has made fighting graft a priority.
Its energy sector is a vital cog in the national war effort against Russia and it has sustained heavy damage from Russian airstrikes this year. Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The Prosecutor General’s Office said the suspects demanded a $500,000 bribe in return for facilitating the removal of a state-owned coal enterprise’s mining equipment from the war-torn areas of the embattled Donetsk region.
As part of the arrangement, the Lviv-Volyn basin coal enterprise was to be authorised to move the equipment and operate it freely at state-owned mines in the western region of Ukraine, it said.
The statement did not identify the deputy minister, but the government said it had sacked deputy energy minister Oleksandr Kheilo with immediate effect. The official could not immediately be reached for comment.
The other suspects included an official at a state-owned coal enterprise and two other intermediaries, it said on Telegram.
The suspects were detained as they were about to receive $100,000 of the $500,000 bribe. The investigators previously documented the group’s receipt of another $200,000, it said.
The Ukrainian energy ministry said German Galushchenko, the energy minister, had helped expose the ploy and immediately appealed to the Cabinet of Ministers to sack the deputy.
Ukraine has been battling corruption for years.
In April, the agriculture minister was detained and sacked over allegations of his involvement in an illegal acquisition of state-owned land worth $7 million. He denied wrongdoing.
(Reporting by Anastasiia Malenko; Writing by Tom Balmforth; editing by Angus MacSwan)
