The head of Ukraine’s Supreme Court has been detained over an alleged bribery scheme, a prosecutor from the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) said on Tuesday.
The prosecutor did not name the official detained, but told a briefing that he was the head of the Supreme Court and had not yet been served with a formal “notice of suspicion”.
The Supreme Court is headed by Chief Justice Vsevolod Kniaziev, who could not be reached for comment.
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and SAPO announced on Monday that they had “exposed large-scale corruption” at the court, and shared a photograph of piles of dollars neatly lined up on a sofa.
“You see that we are showing through real cases, real deeds, what our priority is: it’s top corruption, it’s criminal organisation at the highest levels of power,” NABU director Semen Kryvonos told Tuesday’s briefing.