People's deputy and member of the Temporary Investigative Commission on Illegal Cutting of Forests in Zakarpattia Oblast, Yuliya Yatsyk, suspected officials from the regional prosecutor's office of being involved in forest mafia schemes.
On her Facebook page, she said that the members of the TSK initiated official inspections regarding the inactivity of some heads of the Transcarpathian Regional Police and the Prosecutor's Office, and their inadequacy to their positions.
She said that the Zakarpattia police initiated 17 criminal cases at the request of members of the TSK and two more thanks to the territorial administration of the DBR in Lviv. However, the prosecutor's office did not fully investigate. Thus, none of the members of the TSC, experts, etc., were questioned, and the provided materials of the commission's work were not added to the evidence in the criminal proceedings.
"On two cases, reports of suspicions to forestry officials are being prepared in March, but the perspective of the others (the most high-profile ones) is still without a clearly defined time frame," she said.
People's deputy added that the investigation was deprived of the opportunity to interrogate the main person involved in the criminal cases. He is outside Ukraine, where foreign law enforcement officers brought him to criminal responsibility for illegal possession of narcotic substances. This prompted commission members to look for evidence of smuggling through the so-called greenfield of excise goods, forests and illegal border crossings by men of draft age.
It is noted that on the basis of probably forged documents on the right of ownership, the court returned to the owner the wood seized during the search of one of the largest timber traders in Transcarpathia.
"The members of the TSC received information about the sabotage of the investigation of the specified criminal cases by law enforcement officers of Transcarpathia," Yatsyk said. - Officials of the regional prosecutor's office, who are procedural managers in the above-mentioned criminal cases, actively communicate with representatives of the forest mafia, act as mediators between them and the court, slow down the investigation of criminal cases, and are also involved in the illegal extraction of mineral water, which is the subject of another " "criminal case that has been put on hold."
She noted that the members of the TSC initiated official inspections regarding the inactivity of the head of the regional national police, the regional head of the specialized environmental protection prosecutor's office, and the profile deputy regional prosecutor and their non-compliance with their positions.
Earlier, EcoPolitic wrote, that in Transcarpathia, the prosecutor's office reported the suspicion of an official from the Uzhan National Nature Park, with whose permission more than 2 thousand trees were illegally cut down.
As EcoPolitic previously reported, in Zakarpattia, the Security Service of Ukraine exposed one of the enterprises that illegally mined andesite worth 309 million hryvnias.
