On October 29, the HACC Appeals Chamber upheld the acquittal of Serhii Filonenko, former director of the state-owned Izium Instrument-Making Plant. The trial court had found him not guilty of accepting a bribe of over UAH 2.44 million from Vitalii Zhukov, former head of Optymumspetsdetal LLC.
One judge on the panel issued a dissenting opinion.
At first instance, the court found that the documents submitted confirmed lawful transactions between the plant and Optymumspetsdetal LLC. The prosecutor had not presented sufficient evidence, taken as a whole, of Filonenko’s guilt. The court ruled the WhatsApp correspondence inadmissible because it was obtained in violation of the right to privacy, and held that the findings of journalistic investigations carry no weight as procedural evidence.
On appeal, the prosecution asked the court to overturn the acquittal and sentence Filonenko under Article 368(4) of the Criminal Code to 10 years’ imprisonment, with a 3-year ban on holding certain positions. The prosecutor argued that Filonenko, while heading a strategic state enterprise, organized a corruption scheme instead of strengthening the country’s defense capacity.
The prosecution disagreed with the first-instance acquittal and maintained that Filonenko was guilty. The prosecutor said that examination reports on the laptop and iCloud account of another defendant, Andrii Rohoza, along with screenshots of correspondence, confirmed arrangements between Vitalii Zhukov and Serhii Filonenko, consistent with the findings of a Bihus.info investigation.
As reported earlier, in September 2023, Kyiv’s Solomianskyi District Court approved plea agreements with Andrii Rohoza and Vitalii Zhukov. The two had set up a scheme to supply components for military equipment to Ukroboronprom enterprises.
The defense maintained that Filonenko’s actions contained no elements of a crime and that the business relations between Optymumspetsdetal LLC and the Izium Instrument-Making Plant were entirely lawful. The defense also argued that the pretrial investigation period in the case had expired back in April 2022, so the proceedings should have been closed under clause 10 of Article 284(1) of the Criminal Procedure Code (expiry of the pretrial investigation period).
The events in the case took place in 2016–2017. According to the prosecution, Filonenko was to receive the bribe from Zhukov in exchange for concealing fraud in payments for military goods supplied, to the benefit of Optymumspetsdetal.
We covered related events in more detail in our article.
