A solid gold toilet and cupboards loaded with bagfuls of €200 bills are among the treasures linked to the prominent Ukrainian businessman Timur Mindich, after an investigation by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (Nabu). Mindich is big in real estate, fertilisers, banking and diamond trading – but he is best known as a long-time co-owner of Volodymyr Zelensky’s Kvartal 95 television production company. Nabu’s 15-month long investigation into what it describes as ‘high level’ corruption at the top of Ukraine’s political elite is likely to have momentous consequences for Zelensky’s political future.
Zelensky will inevitably face serious questions as his close political and business allies fall under suspicion
According to a YouTube video put out by Nabu, their investigation has focused on alleged ‘kickbacks’ from contractors hired to build fortifications to defend energy infrastructure against Russian missiles and drones. The $100 million corruption scheme involved major public enterprises including Ukraine’s national nuclear power company Energoatom, alleges Nabu. As well as Mindich, former energy minister and justice minister Herman Halushchenko is among the suspects. Halushchenko has been suspended as justice minister, but says he will ‘defend myself in the legal domain and prove my position.’ Seventy searches have been carried out with serious charges to follow – though Mindich and several other leading suspects fled Ukraine just hours before the raids.
Zelensky himself publicly supported the anticorruption crackdown, telling the nation in his nightly address that ‘there must be sentences’ and urging government officials to ‘work together with Nabu and law enforcement agencies.’ But Zelensky will inevitably face serious questions as his close political and business allies fall under suspicion. And it’s also very fishy that just four months ago Zelensky attempted to bring Nabu and its sister agency Sapo under direct government control, forcing through quickly-drafted legislation to scrap the agencies’ operational independence. Zelensky’s move shocked Ukraine’s international allies and prompted major street demonstrations in central Kyiv, the first public protests against the government since the beginning of the war. Under intense back-room pressure from Brussels and Washington, as well as from the Kyiv street, Zelensky eventually backed down. Nabu and Sapo’s interrupted investigations continued – culminating in this week’s politically damaging raids.
A full-scale war seems to be about to break between independent anticorruption agencies and Zelensky’s inner circle, and the consequences are likely to be ugly. Ukraine’s National Security Service, known as the SBU, is loyal to Zelensky and wields considerable domestic power through its control of the judicial system and prisons. Nabu and Sapo, on the other hand, are heavily backed politically and financially by European and US governments and helped operationally by Western security agencies. That perceived nexus of notional independence and de facto Western control has prompted some Ukrainian politicians to denounce Nabu as a tool of foreign domination. Ukraine is turning into a ‘disenfranchised colony that is losing its sovereignty,’ complained former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko in August after she backed attempts to scrap Nabu’s independence.
So far the full extent of Nabu’s investigation remains officially confidential. But a slew of recent reports, including in the New York Times, suggest that corruption runs deep and far and involves many figures linked to Zelensky and to Kvartal 95. Questions have been raised over how Fire Point, a casting agency for Zelensky’s films before the war, came to acquire multi-million dollar government contracts to produce drones for the Ukrainian army. Fire Point – which has not been charged with any wrongdoing – also produces a newly-developed Flamingo long-range cruise missile.
During their searches, Nabu officers discovered over 1,000 hours of audio recordings that Mindich allegedly made of his conversations with business partners. A short teaser trailer put out on social media by Nabu featured a series of clips from different conversations between two men identified by code names who converse in Russian. The recordings don’t make much sense to outsiders – but their publication appears to a warning shot aimed at a very specific audience at the top of Ukraine’s political establishment.
One sad takeaway of this murky story is that in many ways Ukraine continues to live by the same rules as prevailed in the wild 1990s under Leonid Kuchma or in Boris Yeltsin’s Russia. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union it became commonplace for wealthy businessmen to buy control over elements of the security forces and put them to work recording private conversations between leading politicians or business rivals and use the resulting ‘kompromat’ as a political tool. This time round the players are the Western-backed Nabu duking it out with the Zelensky-backed SBU – but the crossover of corruption and high-level politics feels depressingly like a trip back to the future.
The go-to response for many Zelensky loyalists will be to write the allegations off as Kremlin smears. Indeed Zelensky’s justification for his attempt to bring Nabu under his control back in July were vague and never substantiated allegations of Russian penetration of Nabu. But with the West watching closely, Zelensky has little choice but to endorse Nabu’s takedown of his closest allies and business partners and deal with the consequences for his reputation and political career.
The image of a golden toilet which was discovered in former president Viktor Yanukovych’s luxurious suburban mansion became an iconic emblem of the corruption that led to 2014’s momentous Maidan protests. It’s a supreme irony that the revolution against those golden toilet-owners led eventually to a full-scale war with Russia – the profits from which, it seems, have been used to buy yet more golden toilets.
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