Ukraine says it has uncovered major drone procurement corruption scheme

South China Morning Post

a day ago

Ukraine's anti-corruption bodies said on Saturday they had uncovered a major corruption scheme that procured military drones and signal jamming systems at inflated prices, two days after the agencies' independence was restored following major protests.
The independence of Ukraine's anti-corruption investigators and prosecutors, NABU and SAPO, was reinstated by parliament on Thursday after a move to take it away resulted in the country's biggest protests since
Russia's invasion in 2022.
In a statement published by both agencies on social media, NABU and SAPO said they had caught a sitting lawmaker, two local officials and an unspecified number of national guard staff taking bribes. None of them were identified in the statement.
'The essence of the scheme was to conclude state contracts with supplier companies at deliberately inflated prices,' it said, adding that the offenders had received kickbacks of up to 30 per cent of a contract's cost. Four people had been arrested.
'There can only be zero tolerance for corruption, clear teamwork to expose corruption and, as a result, a just sentence,' President
Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Telegram.
Zelensky, who has far-reaching wartime presidential powers and still enjoys broad approval among Ukrainians, was forced into a rare political about-face when his attempt to bring NABU and SAPO under the control of his prosecutor-general sparked the first nationwide protests of the war.