Irpin Mayor Oleksandr Markushyn, who was arrested by the court on January 24, stated that the case against him was opened in the interests of the former mayor of Irpin, developer Volodymyr Karplyuk.
“Yesterday we saw the first precedent in Ukraine, when, on command from above, right during the hearing, a judge is instructed to make an illegal decision in a purchased case and remove the current mayor in favor of the customer. And with trembling hands, the judge of the Pechersk court, Svitlana Ivanivna Grechana, obediently committed this crime before your eyes.
Why was the law violated so blatantly? The whole thing is in the session, which was scheduled for January 30 and shattered Karplyuk’s (former mayor of Irpin Volodymyr Karplyuk – ed.) last chances to legalize his market on the floodplain, the River Port residential complex, etc. That’s why the prosecutors closed the case quickly, with gross violations, they didn’t even have time to question me.”
Markushyn asks whether “now all developers can pay several hundred thousand dollars to imprison the mayor of, for example, Kyiv, Lviv, Dnipro, Bucha… to seize power in the city behind his back and make illegal decisions that the mayor prevented from being made?”
“I was sure that the justice of my state, which we defended in Irpen during the fighting, should protect me. And it turned out that the justice of Ukraine protects those who give it a bribe and blindly chooses the highest measure of restraint – two months in a pre-trial detention center – for a single father, leaving a 4-year-old son who lost his mother and now also without a father.
As an alternative, they chose a bail of over 30 million hryvnias, so that there would be absolutely no chance of getting out. An amount that is many times higher than the bail in cases of top corrupt officials, fugitives abroad, and embezzlers of the budget.”
The mayor noted that on Saturday residents are taking to the central square “to resist the raider’s capture of Irpin, and most importantly, to show the deputies of the “New Faces” that they are pure evil in the Irpin community.”
He added that an appeal will be filed on Monday against the court’s decision to place him in preventive detention.
“Every baseless accusation, slander of Karplyuk’s witnesses Pashchynsky, Kravchuk, Negresha, and Karplyuk himself – everything has been shattered by lawyers,” Markushyn wrote.