The Shevchenkivskyi District Court of Kyiv returned the indictment to the prosecutor in the case of the scandalous businessman from Odessa, Dmytro Malinovsky, known for faking his own death in 2014 and hiding in France for several years.
The story of this Odessa resident dates back to 2012. Then Malinovsky and his companion were accused of fraud on a particularly large scale: using forged documents, they seized the corporate rights of an enterprise that owned commercial real estate in Odessa.
In 2014, the businessman's wife received a parcel with an urn and a "death certificate" from temporarily occupied Luhansk. On this basis, a Ukrainian court declared Malinovsky dead.
However, in 2018 it became known that he was alive and living in France. There he was exposed by the police, who were interested in buying a castle worth about 3 million euros. During searches of the estate, property worth more than 4.6 million euros was found, including a vintage Rolls Royce Phantom and paintings by Salvador Dali.
French law enforcement officers detained Malinovsky, and the Ukrainian prosecutor's office filed a request for his extradition. But it was not possible to return him to Ukraine. In 2023, prosecutors filed a new indictment in absentia with the court — for fraud and money laundering.
The preparatory hearing at the Shevchenko Court in Kyiv dragged on for over two years. The prosecutor's office demanded a special trial in the absence of the accused. Instead, Malinovsky himself joined the hearings via video link from France, claiming that he could not come in person because he was under the control of the local police and the court.
The court concluded that Malinovsky was not in hiding, as his location was known to the prosecutor. Therefore, the indictment was deemed to be in breach of the law and sent for revision.
In effect, this decision "freezes" the process in Ukraine and leaves the prospects of bringing Malinovsky to justice uncertain.
