State Bureau of Investigations (SBI) Director Roman Truba has said the next questioning of ex-President Petro Poroshenko may be conducted with the assistance of lie-detecting equipment. “We don’t rule out that the next interrogation could take place with the use of lie-detecting equipment. There is nothing awful about this. All our employees take lie-detector tests every year,” Truba said on his Telegram channel.
Truba said Poroshenko was questioned for two hours on Monday about possible tax evasion involving the acquisition of the Pryamiy TV channel.
Unidentified people near SBI tried to hit Poroshenko with eggs when he left the SBI building on Monday.
Rallies were held for and against Poroshenko before and after he was questioned.
Unnamed men who obviously want Poroshenko to face criminal charges threw eggs at him when he was leaving the SBI building, but the eggs mainly hit journalists. Police intervened, but the hooligans escaped. Poroshenko, who was accompanied by his son Mykhailo and daughter Yevhenia, was unhurt. As reported, on July 25, four unknown men attempted to assault Poroshenko after he was questioned in Kyiv. The men escaped.
The former deputy head of the Presidential Administration under ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, Andriy Portnov, has said Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigations (SBI) has opened a criminal case to probe facts of embezzling funds from state-run Concern Ukroboronprom and siphoning them off into offshore accounts, and suspects in the case “could include dozens of ex-President Poroshenko’s allies.”
“Let me inform you about a new criminal case, which can incriminate dozens of people among Poroshenko’s associates. The SBI yesterday officially registered the case and began its investigation,” Portnov said on Facebook on Thursday.
Portnov said Poroshenko gave direct instructions to ex-National Bank of Ukraine Chairwoman Valeriya Gontareva, and the NBU board on January 19, 2016, revoked NBU decisions on hard currency control involving foreign economic activities, establishing that payments of Ukroboronprom to offshore accounts could be used for making prepayments without NBU hard currency controls and limits.
“This enabled the theft of several billion hryvnias from Ukraine’s army, hiding behind official decisions made by the NBU,” Portnov said.
Interfax-Ukraine has not received confirmation from the SBI regarding Portnov’s statements.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has decided to set up a team of experts to assess the results of the “judicial reform” conducted by his predecessor, Petro Poroshenko. “Recently we have been concerned by the situation with various courts (in particular the ‘reformed’ ones) proclaiming rulings which lawyers think were not based on the requirements of the Ukrainian Constitution and the law,” Ruslan Riaboshapka, deputy chief of the presidential administration, said.
The presence of such court rulings was a “glaring testament to the failure of the judicial reform” carried out on Poroshenko’s watch, he said.
“This led the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to decide to form a group of experts to assess the results of the ‘judicial reform’ and prepare legislative and practical steps to urgently resolve the problems of functioning of the judicial branch of government,” Riaboshapka said.
Both the public and Zelensky’s administration expect a swift and principled reaction from the Supreme Council of Justice to such court rulings, the official said.
Just under a half of Ukrainians (48.4%) said they would vote for Volodymyr Zelensky and 17% for the incumbent, Petro Poroshenko, were the second round of the presidential election held right now, according to the findings of a poll conducted by the Kiyv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) on April 9-14. Seventeen point nine per cent were undecided, 1.6% were going to ruin the ballot, 6.3% did not intend to go to the polls and 8.8% refused to answer the question.
KIIS interviewed 2,004 respondents in 129 towns across Ukraine; in Luhansk and Donetsk region, the poll was conducted only in Ukraine-controlled parts of the regions.
The runoff is due to be held on April 21.
Presidential candidates Volodymyr Zelensky and incumbent President Petro Poroshenko have received 30.40% and 16.03% of votes cast on March 31, respectively, according to Ukraine’s Central Election Commission (CEC) with 80.20% of voting protocols processed.
According to the CEC website, 13.24% of voters cast ballots for Batkivschyna Party leader Yulia Tymoshenko, followed by Opposition Platform – For Life candidate Yuriy Boiko – 11.55%.
Civil Position Party leader Anatoliy Hrytsenko received 7.03%, followed by ex-SBU State Security Service head Ihor Smeshko – 5.95%, Radical Party leader Oleh Liashko – 5.29%, Opposition Bloc leader Oleksandr Vilkul – 4.3% and Svoboda Party leader Ruslan Koshulynsky – 1.65%.
Some 1.18% of ballots cast were ruled invalid.
Zelensky, Poroshenko reach second round of presidential race – national exit poll
Showman Volodymyr Zelensky is the leader in the first round of the presidential election in Ukraine with 30.4% supportive votes, incumbent head of state Petro Poroshenko has 17.8% of the votes, leader of Batkivschyna Party Yulia Tymoshenko – 14.2%, according to the National exit poll.
Some 9.8% of voters backed the candidate from the Opposition Platform – For Life Yuri Boiko, 7.1% of voters cast their votes in favor of leader of Hromadianska Pozytsia (Civil Position) Party Anatoliy Hrytsenko, 6.4% – former Security Service Head Ihor Smeshko, 4.8% – leader of Radical Party Oleh Liashko, and 4.0% – candidate from the Opposition Block – the Party of Peace and Development Oleksandr Vilkul.
In the regional context, Zelensky is leading in the south of Ukraine (42.0%), 30.7% of Ukrainians in the east cast their votes in favor of Zelensky, 28.6% in the center and 21.2% in the west of the country.
Poroshenko got the most of votes in the west of Ukraine (26.0%), 19.5% in the center, 11.1% in the south and in 9.6% the east.
Tymoshenko has almost the same support in the west (17.8%) and in the center of Ukraine (17.5%), in the south she was supported by 9.5% of voters, and by 7.3% in the east.
Some 27.2% voted in favor of Boiko in the east of Ukraine, 15.2% in the south, 5.7% in the center, and 1.9% in the west.
Hrytsenko saw the greatest support in the west of the country (12.6%), 7.4% in the center, 3.3% in the south and 2.7% in the east.
The national exit poll was conducted by a consortium of Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation, Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) and the Razumkov Centre.
