Former head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Andriy Ermak, suspected of laundering 460 million UAH, during a meeting of the Supreme Anti-Corruption Court on May 21, spoke about his father’s flights to the aggressor country Russia at the end of 2019. Radio Liberty reported this.
Earlier, journalists from the Schemes project (Radio Liberty) wrote that Boris Ermak, who is also a defendant in the Midas case, flew in transit to the Russian Federation through Belarus at the end of 2019, when Vladimir Zelensky was already the President of Ukraine, and Ermak was his assistant. Investigators have established that on November 2, 2019, Boris Ermak and his wife flew from Minsk to St. Petersburg on a Belavia flight, and returned back on November 6. His wife, a native of St. Petersburg, made such trips at least three times: in 2018 and twice in 2019. In 2019, the project said that Andrei Ermak and his father had business ties with the Russian political elite.
Now the name of Boris Ermak was mentioned by prosecutors of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAP) during a meeting about the preventive measure against his son. According to the investigation, the father of the ex-head of the OP supervised the construction of the elite residence “R-2” in Kozin until 2022, held meetings, approved estimates and coordinated financial documents. The case file contains his correspondence for December 2022 regarding expenses for electrical materials. Subsequently, these functions were transferred to designer Natalya Kvelenkova, who likely became the new confidant of the project, the article says. No official charges were brought against Boris Ermak, but people’s deputies called on law enforcement officers to check his trip to the Russian Federation.
When asked about these flights, the ex-head of the OP in the courtroom replied that it was better to ask his father about this.
“My father is 81 years old. He is a very respected, honest, patriotic person. I don’t know about his trips. And even if he did, I think he should say so,” Ermak noted, adding that “this is not the first campaign” against his family.
He called the suspicion against himself “unfounded,” since the prosecution did not provide evidence of his involvement in this case, “everything is based solely on assumptions.”
“The investigation has not received a single piece of evidence regarding any of my participation in the financing, construction and, accordingly, the legalization of any funds. Moreover, I want to say that the very fact of building some residence completely unknown to me does not automatically constitute a crime under Article 209 of the Criminal Code, which I am accused of,” the former head of the OP emphasized.
