February 8, the Verkhovna Rada scheduled Prosecutor General Mykhailo Potebenko’s progress report for February and the date will be designated by the Conciliation Council.
Meanwhile People’s Deputy Serhiy Holovaty said at a news February 8 conference at Verkhovna Rada that he had forwarded the original tapes of former SBU Major Mykola Melnychenko to the International Press Institute in Vienna. Mr. Holovaty showed the journalists present the deed of transfer and a copy of his air ticket to Vienna. The same records and in the same amount were submitted to the ad hoc committee of inquiry. People’s Deputies Taras Chornovil and Oleksandr Turchynov, whose conversations with the president are also on the tapes, heard them and declared that they were authentic.
Genetic tests are still underway in Germany. According to Mr. Holovaty, he had met with German experts and did not trust the expert findings provided by Prosecutor General Potebenko, considering that such tests obviously take time, much longer than they did in Ukraine.
Earlier, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office questioned Deputy Taras Chornovil, following his statement confirming his voice on one of former Major Melnychenko’s tapes allegedly recorded in the president’s office, reports Interfax Ukraine. Deputy Prosecutor General Oleksiy Baha-nets said as much at a February 7 news conference that while Mr. Chornovil was being questioned his voice was recorded as a sample for a an expert examination. He further informed that prosecutors summon Director of the State Tax Administration Mykola Azarov for questioning. SBU ex-chief Leonid Derkach will soon follow suit shortly. As previously reported, a search at the apartment of the brothers Rudkovsky (one of them, Mykola, is an assistant to Socialist leader Oleksandr Moroz) revealed CDs with some twenty hours of the president’s conversations with other ranking officials. “The president does not rule out the possibility of such conversations,” he said and reaffirmed that the prosecutor’s office believes such recording in the president’s office did take place. “We are convinced that eavesdropping of the office took place,” the Deputy Prosecutor General declared and then stressed that one cannot “resolutely confirm this,” for want of conclusive evidence to date.
Hard copies of 22 files found on Rudkovsky’s computer’s hard disk are currently available. “Among them are ones with identical contents but varying duration,” he said. The investigating officers will also establish precisely what words were added to the tapes previously made public.
UNIAN quotes Oleksandr Bahanets as saying that criminal proceedings in conjunction with eavesdropping on the office of the president of Ukraine could start before the end of month. He also announced that a criminal case will be started after the experts study the voice samples of People’s Deputies Oleksandr Turchynov and Taras Chornovil and confirm that they are identical to the voices on SBU Major Mykola Melnychenko’s tapes. He went on to say that after proper investigation, criminal proceedings will be initiated against Mykola Melnychenko for eavesdropping on the president. He will face charges under Article 166, Section 2, of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (abuse of office), which provide for a term of three to eight years.
According to Korrespondent.net on February 9 in Truskavets vacationing Prosecutor General Mykhailo Potebenko met with the For the Truth Movement, stating he will not report to parliament because it is “unconstitutional.”
