This week, the People's Deputies and a number of mass media are predicting a fairly large-scale personnel reshuffle, both in the government and in the Prosecutor General's Office. Allegedly, the resignation of Prosecutor General Andrii Kostin is expected.
According to information from sources directly from the Prosecutor General's Office, the main reason for the resignation was scandals related to Kostin's frequent absence from Ukraine. People's deputies previously reported that the Prosecutor General spent many days on foreign business trips, the lion's share of which fell on the USA, where his family lives.
According to sources, at first the most likely successor of Kostin was called Oleg Kiper, close to the Office of the President, the former prosecutor of Kyiv and the current head of the Odesa Military Administration, who recently claimed in an interview that he had not received any offers to become the Prosecutor General. By the way, Kiper, like Kostin, is from Odessa.
But neither Kiper's candidacy nor anyone else's has yet been approved. And that is why it is quite likely that after Kostin's resignation for some time acting the Prosecutor General will be his current first deputy Oleksiy Khomenko.
If Kiper or Khomenko becomes the new Prosecutor General, it will mean that for the first time since 2016, a staff prosecutor will become the Prosecutor General of Ukraine. After the release of Viktor Shokin, even under President Petro Poroshenko, the Prosecutor General's chair was occupied by people from outside the prosecutor's office - Lutsenko, Ryaboshapka, Venediktova and Kostin.
Kiper, on the other hand, worked in the General Prosecutor's Office during Yanukovych's time, which is why he came under the influence of the law on lustration. However, in 2019, the District Administrative Court reinstated him and declared lustration illegal. In the summer of 2020, Kiper first became a deputy prosecutor of Kyiv, and then headed the Kyiv City Prosecutor's Office.
