A Ukrainian court ruled Friday that Agriculture Minister Mikola Solski should be arrested in the case in which he is accused of involvement in an illegal purchase of state-owned land worth about $7 million, Reuters reports.
Mikola Solski, Ukrainian Minister of AgriculturePhoto: lev radin / Alamy / Alamy / Profimedia
Solski denies the charges, which relate to acts committed between 2017 and 2021 before he became agriculture minister.
The judge who ordered the politician’s arrest set bail at 75.7 million hryvnias ($1.9 million).
Solski handed in his resignation letter on Thursday, but technically remains in his post until Parliament takes note of his resignation.
He is the first minister in Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s administration to be named as a suspect in a corruption case.
On Tuesday, the national anti-corruption agency announced that Mikola Solski is suspected of confiscating public land worth “almost 6.9 million euros” and “attempting to appropriate other land” worth nearly 4.5 million euros .
To this end, authorities say, he acted in concert with officials from the state department of cadastre and cartography.
Between 2017 and 2021, they are suspected of having come into possession of nearly 2,500 hectares in the Şumi region, in the northeast of the country, through a system that involved the evasion of official documents.
Mikola Solski worked for a law firm until 2019, according to her official bio. He was elected to parliament that year and appointed minister in March 2022.
The defendants also tried to appropriate another 3,282 hectares of land but were “prevented” from doing so by prosecutors and anti-corruption officers, the national anti-corruption agency said.
The Ministry of Agriculture released Mikola Solski’s response to these allegations, in which he states that between 2017 and 2018 he held positions as a lawyer and not public responsibilities.
“I promise maximum transparency to establish the truth,” he added, according to the statement.
The fight against corruption, an endemic evil in Ukraine, is one of the major conditions imposed by the 27 EU member states as part of the application to join the European Union.
