Millions of hryvnias, which during the second half of 2018 flew to the account of the Batkivshchyna Party as contributions, turned out to have been transferred by front persons, according to a journalistic investigation released Thursday, Feb 28.
The law says political parties represented in the Verkhovna Rada receive state funding. This, in turn, obliges them to file financial reports quarterly and annually, where, in addition to information about the money received from the budget, they must reveal the funds received from individuals and legal entities, reads a report by Bihus.info about the investigation by their Nashi Groshi project, the same team that recently published the first two parts of their probe into corruption schemes in defense industry.
In the second half of 2018, when the active phase of the election campaign of the Batkivshchyna leader and presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko began, the contributions to her party's account jumped sharply. The report said that dozens of Ukrainians from small towns and villages donated to Tymoshenko's political force sums up to UAH 150,000 and higher.
While verifying this information, journalists found that among the largest donors of the Batkivshchyna is a supermarket cashier from a Kyiv suburb, an unemployed resident of Sumy, a car wash employee, and a fictitious enterprise registered on a kindergarten worker from Uman.
Most of the "donors" polled were amused to hear about the donations they "had made". This indicates that the Party uses personal data of Ukrainian citizens to legalize funds received in an unknown way.
One of the donors from Kirovograd region, who works as a nail salon and allegedly contributed to the account of the Batkivshchyna almost UAH 150,000, admitted that she had been "asked" to do so by someone from the local branch of the party, who had earlier helped the woman with her daughter's medical treatment.
Two years ago, journalists of the "Nashi Groshi with Denys Bihus" project had already recorded the use of personal data of Ukrainians when payments were sent to the Batkivshchyna account. Then the party exploited mostly pensioners who donated thousands of hryvnias on paper, but in reality they admitted that they never did this. A criminal case has been opened into that fact.
The leader of the Batkivshchyna party, Yulia Tymoshenko, explains such payments with a provocation against her by the SBU Security Service, as well as the sincere help of citizens who are afraid to talk about it because of fear of persecution by the authorities.
Earlier it was reported that the Specialized Anti-corruption Prosecutor's Office refused to open a criminal case against People's Deputy and presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko.
