A Ukrainian judicial disciplinary committee has moved to dismiss a highly controversial judge accused of participating in a widespread court corruption ring, marking the culmination of a years-long legal saga.
The judge has been suspended from the bench pending a final vote on his dismissal. While the current charges stem from secret audio recordings of judges fixing cases, he is best known to the public for his role in the PrivatBank scandal, one of the largest financial fraud cases in Eastern European history.
PrivatBank was Ukraine’s largest commercial lender until 2016, when international auditors and the government discovered a massive $5.5 billion shortfall in the bank’s finances. Authorities accused the bank’s billionaire co-owners of running a shadow banking operation, allegedly using PrivatBank to issue billions in fake loans to their own shell companies. The government was forced to nationalize the bank to prevent a collapse of the national economy.
In April 2019, the judge chaired a judicial panel that stunned financial markets by ruling the nationalization illegal. The decision handed a major legal victory to the bank’s former owners and complicated government efforts to recover the missing billions through international courts in the United States and Britain.
Despite the public outrage over the PrivatBank ruling, the disciplinary action against the judge stems from a separate scandal known as the Vovk tapes. In 2020, Ukraine’s anti-corruption bureau released secret recordings of judges from the Kyiv District Administrative Court allegedly discussing how to trade favors, accept bribes, and issue fake rulings to protect their power.
According to investigators, fabricated lawsuits were deliberately assigned to the judge so he could issue rulings that blocked anti-corruption officials from vetting corrupt judges. His lawyers argued that the audio quality was too poor to prove the voice was his, but the disciplinary committee voted to hold him liable anyway.
The judge attempted to resign before he could be dismissed, applying for formal resignation in 2024, which would have granted him a lucrative lifetime state pension. However, Ukraine’s High Council of Justice froze his resignation due to the open corruption investigation. After a court rejected his attempt to force retirement, the disciplinary committee finally voted for dismissal.