AJ
Ukraine’s Rivne City Court sentenced the former head of a structural unit of the National Police Main Directorate on February 17 for accepting a bribe from the head of the Bereznivka District Hospital.
According to the investigation, the money was demanded ahead of doing checks on employees and issuing certificates showing no criminal records.
The court document stated that at the end of 2016, a police officer demanded and received a bribe form the head doctor of the district hospital for checking employees for criminal records and issuing relevant certificates.
These certificates were needed by the chief physician of the municipal institution ‘Bereznivska Central District Hospital’ to obtain a licence, and the head of the Department of Information Support and Police Coordination of the Main Directorate of the National Police in Rivne was charged for receiving a payment to change them.
According to the doctor: “The policeman assured that he could help speed up the production of certificates, because the amount of work needed is significant and the employees needed to be ‘stimulated’ – he also mentioned the need for repairs in the premises and the need for computer desks.
“Later, the law enforcement officer said that the tables were not needed and asked if computers could be obtained instead, and then directly asked for money – he wrote the amount in a notebook,” the doctor said.
After the hospital received certificates and a licence, the policeman, according to the doctor, began calling and reminding about the alleged “debt,” adding that “interest rates were rising,” so the doctor recorded one of the conversations on a dictaphone and contacted the National Police’s internal security.
The fact of receiving a bribe was documented and the policeman was detained after three thousand hryvnias were put in his drawer – the accused pleaded not guilty, but was fired from the police in September 2019, and according to the information from the verdict, he went on to work at Novaya Poshta.
According to the court, the man was sentenced to five years in prison, but the verdict had not yet entered into force, and the parties were given the option of appealing it in the court of appeal.
