Chervinskyy explains insistence on testifying against Yermak
Andriy Yermak in court (Photo: Serhii Okunev / NV)
Roman
Chervinskyy, a former senior officer with Ukraine’s SBU security service,
told NV that he asked to be a witness in the case against former presidential
office head Andriy
Yermak to provide additional details about Yermak’s alleged corruption.
“I wanted to be a witness so the court would take into account that Andriy Yermak, since 2019, began shaping budgets through corrupt schemes — selecting people and proposing their appointments so they could later generate corrupt revenues; he has acted in this direction since then,” Chervinskyy said in an interview on May 14.
Chervinskyy said that missing from the current indictment is a “predicate crime,” the criminal path by which Yermak allegedly obtained the funds.
“We hear these conversations in the apartment of businessman and friend of President Zelenskyy, Tymur Mindich, in the office where he gives instructions to then-ministers Herman Halushchenko and Rustem Umerov about where to allocate funds,” he added.
He said those elements should be combined “into one indictment or charge, that this was not accidental,” and that Yermak “from 2019 began forming such a hierarchy in state bodies of Ukraine. And it was his appointees, whom he put in positions through bribes or other means, who formed these criminal budgets.” Only then, he said, “can there be a full understanding of the crime Yermak committed by the court, the prosecution and the public.”
Chervinskyy warned that without that context the defense could undercut the case.
“For example, tomorrow Yermak’s defense could present some document or loan agreement claiming a friend of his father — perhaps even from Russia — lent him those UAH400 million, and the whole case could collapse,” he said.
In the same interview, Chervinskyy recounted his first
meetings in 2019 with Yermak and his brother Denys, after which he says he was
asked to pay $10,000. He also said that Dmitro Shtanko, who recorded Denys
Yermak soliciting $10,000 for each meeting, later went to the front and was
killed. “That’s why I’m here today,” Chervinskyy said in court, addressing
Yermak. Yermak has denied the claim.
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