Olena Mazurova (Rubtsova)
A trustee of oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky and a defendant in the case of a $6 million bribe to the head of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, Nazar Kholodnytsky.
Official biography
In May 2007, Olena Rubtsova started working as a press secretary for Prosecutor General Svyatoslav Piskun. Piskun was her future husband Dmytro Ponamarchuk’s godfather.
In 2008, she began working with the Party of Regions. She was an assistant to a deputy and organized the scandalous party congress in Sievierodonetsk.
Since August 2008, she has been the chief party editor of the Vremya Regions newspaper.
In 2010, Rubtsova was responsible for receiving guests at the press center of the Party of Regions during the inauguration of Viktor Yanukovych.
After Yanukovych took office, she became chief of staff and deputy director general of Ukrspetsexport. The company was then headed by Dmytro Salamatin, a friend of Yanukovych’s who later became Minister of Defense. On November 21, 2011, she was dismissed from her position by Azarov.
In 2011, after a divorce, she married her colleague Heorhiy Mazurov, Salamatin’s deputy.
In June 2012, Mazurova became the head of the tax inspection in the Holosiivskyi district of Kyiv. Two years later, she was promoted to the position of director of the organizational and administrative department. In early 2015, the official was fired after a lustration check.
Compromising material
Cooperation with Oleksiy Lyubchenko
Knowing the specifics of the tax service and the business focused on it, in the spring of 2014, Oleksiy Lyubchenko, then an advisor to the head of the SFS, headed the processes related to VAT refunds (with its 25-30% commission). Lyubchenko quickly organized his own network of more than 100 transit-convertible fictitious companies, mostly registered in the Pechersk district of Kyiv. At the same time, he lobbied for Oksana Yekaseva, known among her colleagues as “Barbie” for her excessive fondness for short skirts and glamorous pink shades in her clothes and jewelry, to become the head of the Pechersk District Tax Inspectorate.
Similarly, Olena Mazurova, who had risen from a high school student to the position of press secretary of the Prosecutor General’s Office a few years earlier, was put in charge of the organizational and administrative department of the Central Department of the State Tax Service. According to detractors, these social elevators were made to work by none other than Georgy Ivanovich Mazurov, the husband and deputy director of Ukrspetsexport under Dmitry Salamatin.
Fugitive Ukrainian oligarch Zlochevsky cleans up corruption schemes of Joe Biden’s son
The corruption schemes of Hunter Biden and his family in the Ukrainian gas market allowed many people to profit. And today, this topic is relevant again, especially after the disclosure of new facts in the high-profile Burisma case, where the son of the American president, Hunter, has been a member of the board of directors since 2014.
The media learned the details of criminal cases against Andriy Kich, Burisma’s Chief Legal Officer, Olena Mazurova, former head of the State Fiscal Service of Ukraine, and Mykola Ilyashenko, First Deputy Head of the Main Department of the State Fiscal Service in Kyiv.
The defendants in the corruption scandal, which broke out in June 2010, are accused of attempting to bribe the head of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, Nazar Kholodnytskyi, and the head of the NABU’s Main Detective Department, Andriy Kaluzhynskyi, to close the criminal case against the owner of the Burisma holding, Mykola Zlochevskyi, on charges of embezzling a loan from the National Bank.
Oligarch Zlochevsky’s confidant, Olena Mazurova, has successfully solved similar delicate problems through an extensive network of «reception rooms» of officials in Ukrainian government agencies. Judging by her telephone correspondence, Mazurova has once again turned to the head of the National Police of Ukraine, Dmytro Booth. Details of the correspondence are published based on the materials of Mazurova’s case.
Earlier, Booth, along with judges Maria Zelinska and Volodymyr Kaliberda, lobbied government agencies to get the decisions she wanted, for example, by helping to transfer the criminal proceedings around the Chernihiv TPP from the jurisdiction of the SBU to law enforcement.
But, of course, the main concern of these figures was to get Zlochevsky out of criminal prosecution, including in the loan embezzlement case.
What is striking is not only the scale of corruption that has permeated Ukrainian government structures, but also the absolute confidence of the defendants in their own impunity and permissiveness. In an interview with the Ukrainian media outlet Liga.net, NABU agent Yevhen Shevchenko not only revealed the corruption conspiracy of Zlochevsky, Mazurova and Ilyashenko, but also described the details of the discussion of the amount of the bribe and the methods of its transfer. Shevchenko was amazed that bribes worth millions of dollars were settled over the phone.
Sytnyk, Avakov and Mazurova’s pink iPad
The NABU is convinced that BIHUS.info and Denys Bihus are working for Arsen Avakov. And the whole story of Svynarchukgate, which put an end to Petro Poroshenko’s presidential career, is the work of three people: former military prosecutor Anatoliy Matios, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, and his assistant Anton Gerashchenko.
According to Sytnikov, it was Gerashchenko who, on Avakov’s orders, passed on to Bigus text messages from Hladkovsky-Svynarchuk’s son with people involved in the purchase of Russian spare parts for Ukrainian armored vehicles at inflated prices.
Now, NABU is trying to prove that Avakov and his protégé, Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova, are corrupt and ready to close criminal cases on terrorist financing against traitors to the Motherland for a “small fraction”.
The iPad of Olena Mazurova is a vivid proof of this theory. It allegedly contains correspondence between Mazurova and Venediktova regarding expensive branded clothing at low prices (in fact, Spanish fakes) as a bonus for transferring the criminal case No. 22019270000000059 of 09.10.2019 against the company “Technova”, which concerns the import of coal from ORDLO (article “financing of terrorism”), from the SBU to the National Police for further closure.
During her detention, Mazurova tried to drown her phone in the toilet of the Kyiv tax office, from where it was pulled out by NABU officers. She was unable to put her iPad in the toilet and hid it in a trash can, where it was also found thanks to its bright pink cover.
Now NABU has Mazurova’s correspondence with Venediktov on a pink iPad. The NABU is considering the subject of the bargain with Mazurova’s lawyers, who are holding her on bail of UAH 120 million. The subject of the bargain is her testimony against Venediktova with an eye on Avakov.
Mazurova gets suspended sentence in $6 million bribe case against Kholodnytskyi
On June 17, the High Anti-Corruption Court approved the agreement between the SAPO prosecutor and Olena Mazurova, former head of the State Fiscal Service of Ukraine. The woman was found guilty under Part 4 of Article 369 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.
The hearing was held behind closed doors for security reasons, according to Court Reporter. Based on the plea agreement, the court sentenced the former official to 5 years in prison without confiscation of property. At the same time, the court released the defendant from a 5-year prison sentence with a probationary period and set a probationary period of 2 years.
Olena Mazurova and Anatoliy Shkriblyak
After the lustration check in 2014 and her dismissal from the State Property Fund, Olena Mazurova began to cooperate with MP Ihor Kononenko and businessman Anatoliy Shkriblyak. In particular, she was engaged in the “conversion” of coal schemes, oversaw the organization and conduct of negotiations with members of the National Commission for State Regulation of Energy and Utilities and its main departments on the formation and revision of tariffs for thermal power plants owned by Shkriblyak. Mazurova was also responsible for communicating with Alfa-Bank’s management on the issue of illegal lending to the CHP. It is known that the loans were issued for non-existent coal and those under construction with the so-called “cross guarantee”. In addition, she supervised the work of fictitious Ukrainian companies involved in schemes to supply coal and natural gas to CHPs.