Help rescue animals from the front line — shop our Companion Collection 🐾

Shop Now
News Feed

Media: Cabinet fires heads of customs, tax agencies amid corruption cases.

• 1 min read

The Cabinet of Ministers on Feb. 1 dismissed the acting head of the State Customs Service, Viacheslav Demchenko, according to Cabinet sources cited by online newspaper Ekonomichna Pravda.

The Cabinet also fired Demchenko's deputies Oleksandr Shutsky and Ruslan Cherkassky and Tetiana Kiriyenko, acting head of the State Tax Service, according to sources cited by Yevropeiska Pravda and Forbes Ukraine.

David Arakhamia, head of President Volodymyr Zelensky's Servant of the People faction in parliament, also said on Telegram that the leadership of the State Customs Service would be fired.

On Jan. 31, law enforcement charged customs officials in the central city of Zhytomyr with organizing a corruption scheme that illegally imported foreign ambulances into Ukraine and cost the state more than $541,000.

On Jan. 3, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) reported that more than 10 high-ranking officials, including a deputy department head at the State Customs Service and leadership of the Odesa customs office, were involved in a corruption scheme in grain exports that cost the state $186 million in 2022 in unpaid taxes.

Avatar
The Kyiv Independent news desk

We are the news team of the Kyiv Independent. We are here to make sure our readers get quick, essential updates about the events in Ukraine. Feel free to contact us via email with feedback and news alerts.

Read more
News Feed
 (Updated:  )

"Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine. They haven't been doing much," Trump said, hours after a Russian drone strike in a public park killed six people, including two children.

 (Updated:  )

The EU has demanded a reform of Ukraine's notoriously corrupt and politicized prosecution service and called for making the procedure for picking the prosecutor general less political and more merit-based. Meanwhile, anti-corruption activists and pro-reform lawmakers have accused the Ukrainian authorities of sabotaging rule of law reforms and resisting the demand for depoliticizing the Prosecutor General's Office.

Show More