Ukraine’s former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, confirmed on Wednesday morning that the offices of her political party Batkivshchyna had been searched after Ukraine’s two anti-corruption agencies announced that they were carrying out a bribery investigation into an unnamed party leader and sitting parliamentary deputy.
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) said on Tuesday evening that both it and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) had formally placed a party leader with a seat in the Verkhovna Rada under investigation for offering other deputies bribes to vote for or against certain bills.
Ukrainian online newspaper Obozrevatel reported on Wednesday that Tymoshenko was suspected of attempting to bribe Deputy Yuriy Kisiel from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, a deputy who had already been accused of receiving “undue benefit” for his votes in parliament.
“This search is a huge PR stunt. They didn’t find anything, so they just took my work phones, parliamentary documents and personal savings, which are all fully accounted for in my official declaration,” Tymoshenko wrote.
Tymoshenko has repeatedly criticised the work of NABU and SAPO, Ukraine’s two powerful, independent anti-corruption bodies, which most of her party members voted to strip of their power last year. Despite signing legislation placing the agencies under presidential supervision, Zelensky subsequently backtracked after widespread protests against the move broke out, and restored the agencies’ powers.
The first woman to serve as prime minister of Ukraine, Tymoshenko twice held the role, first for just nine months in 2005, and then again from 2007 to 2010. Though she ran for president in 2010, she ultimately lost the second round run-off to pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych.
Seen as pro-Western and anti-Moscow, Tymoshenko was nonetheless a divisive figure, and she was imprisoned for abuse of office in October 2011, though she was subsequently released at the height of the 2014 Maidan demonstrations against Yanukovych, and later had all charges against her dropped.