Ukrainian Justice Ministry officials stole more than €208,000 on servers for digitalization

More than 10 million hryvnias (€208,000) were stolen in Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice on a project involving servers for digitalization.

Two current officials and a former state secretary of the ministry have been named as suspects.

This was announced by the press service of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the press center of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).

According to investigators, in 2021 Ministry of Justice employees purchased equipment through a private company at highly inflated prices, paying 19 million hryvnias for the contract and overpaying by 10 million of that sum.

It should be noted that during this period, the state secretary of the ministry was Olena Bohacheva, who also chaired the ministry’s tender committee. In 2023, she was dismissed after one of the tenders, when the press reported that Bohacheva was in an intimate relationship with the winning bidder.

It has not been officially reported whether Bohacheva is a suspect in this case.

Earlier, the SBU reported that a former Ministry of Defense official embezzled 1 billion hryvnias of budget funds in food procurement for the Ukrainian Armed Forces at inflated prices.