Oleksandr Tarkan, the head of the Department for Supervision of Law Enforcement by BEB Bodies at the Prosecutor General's Office, found himself at the center of a high-profile scandal over a dissertation containing large-scale plagiarism. Despite receiving a PhD in law, it turned out that a significant part of the scientific work was borrowed from the works of other lawyers without citing authorship.
According to the international detective agency Absolution, on March 14, 2024, law enforcement officers entered information into the ERDR regarding the fact of a falsified dissertation (Part 1 of Article 358 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine). The investigation is being conducted by Kharkiv District Police Department No. 3.
The title of Tarkan's dissertation is "Methodology of investigating the acceptance of an offer, promise, or receipt of an improper benefit by a police officer." In the work, the author confidently declared "scientific novelty" and "rooted analysis," but numerous fragments completely coincide with the works of well-known scholars and practitioners in the field of forensics.
In particular, Tarkan used parts of the research without permission or references:
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Andreyka Yu.O. (thesis 2020, NADS);
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Prof. Chernyavsky S.S. (2015 article in the "Bulletin of Criminal Procedure");
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to the staff of the Dnipropetrovsk State University of Internal Affairs (methodological recommendations 2020);
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Pundy O.O. (thesis 2014);
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Judge O.V. Bobrovnyk (published in 2017).
In essence, the dissertation consisted of collected fragments of these works with a slight change in wording - the addition of the words "police agency", which is presented as an "original contribution".
At the same time, NABU has been investigating Tarkan himself for a long time for corruption - receiving illegal benefits for closing criminal proceedings and manipulating property seizures. His "theoretical knowledge" has been actively applied in practice.
It is known that Tarkan paid about 15 thousand dollars for the “protection” and support of his dissertation. His scientific supervisor was Maksym Danshyn, who is currently wanted for high treason. Danshyn, a former Kharkiv lecturer, betrayed Ukraine by transferring to a Russian university and, according to investigations, passed on the coordinates for missile strikes on Karazin’s university. Despite the prepared suspicion under Article 111 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, the case was “solved” thanks to connections in the prosecutor’s office.
The scandal with Tarkan's dissertation is a vivid example of systemic corruption in the personnel policy of law enforcement agencies and the devaluation of academic degrees, which are turned into a tool for legitimizing high positions.
