his son’s gas company – has already been widely debunked.
Put simply, the chronology doesn’t work – the investigation into Burisma, where Hunter worked, was dormant by the time Shokin was pushed out. It would also represent a major historical anomaly. During Shokin’s 13 months in office, not one major figure was convicted. No oligarch. No politician. No ranking bureaucrat. It would appear unlikely he was in the middle of breaking the habit with the Bidens.
[...]
Lack of aggression was a description many would use for Shokin’s approach to the job in his third spell. Two of the people interviewed for this article described the former chief prosecutor as “lazy”, and uninterested in real investigations. Others noted a penchant for bonding with oligarchs over vodka in the bathhouse.
[...]
The approach of Shokin’s office to the Burisma investigations fell into a well-practiced pattern of corruption, the anonymous prosecutor says. By the time of Biden’s intervention, there were no active investigations to speak of.
“If the idea was to get a result on the Burisma case, Shokin would have put his top people on it,” he says. “That didn’t happen. The aims were different.”
Investigations into Burisma, which only ever covered the period from before Hunter Biden’s involvement in the company, were finally settled in 2016. An audio recording purporting to be of Petro Poroshenko in conversation with another gas tycoon acting as a mediator, offered some clues as to the sequencing. In it, the two men talk about a “global solution” to Burisma’s problems: redirecting cashflows to Poroshenko’s companies.
Poroshenko’s spokespeople have described the recordings as fake, but not everyone is convinced.
“Neither Shokin nor Poroshenko wanted to investigate [Burisma owner Mykola] Zlochevsky,” says Sakvarelidze. “They simply began a criminal case, arrested a few assets, and began negotiating with the corruptioneer for a bribe.”
[...]
“Shokin impeded those fighting for justice,” said Vitaly Tytych, a lawyer representing the families of the victims. “It is wrong to call what he did investigations. Because if there is one thing Shokin never did it is investigate.”
[...]
By the time Joe Biden arrived in Kiev in December 2015 to issue his infamous ultimatum, Shokin had lost the support of all but 3.5 per cent of Ukrainians.
Many MPs were also clamouring for his dismissal.
First among them was Yehor Soboliev, then a reformist MP of the Samopomich faction and chair of the parliamentary anti-corruption committee. In July 2015, Soboliev pressed for a vote on Shokin’s ousting. The arithmetic was always against him, as the general prosecutor was a figure of the ruling coalition. But he came surprisingly close, collecting 127 signatures from a required 150. Several members of the ruling parties broke ranks to support his move.
“We were under no illusions,” Soboliev tells The Independent. “We saw how Shokin had made an art of dumping cases while pretending to investigate. How he was a symbol of ineffectiveness and stalling. How he was the embodiment of the post-Soviet prosecutor.”
