NABU operation "Carthage": what business thinks about the new corruption scandal

The materials released by NABU and the SAP on operation "Carthage," which exposed a criminal organization in the Office of the Prosecutor General, provoked a strong reaction from Ukrainian entrepreneurs and former heads of state-owned companies. According to the investigation, officials from the central apparatus of the prosecutor’s office provided systemic protection to fraudulent call centers and laundered shadow income.

This was reported by Dilo with reference to entrepreneurs’ posts on Facebook.

Volodymyr PopereShnyuk, co‑founder of NOVA ("Nova Poshta")

The NOVA co‑founder views the scandalous tapes as clear evidence of the dominance of an official "political means of enrichment," where wealth is not created through one’s own labor but appropriated by force.

"Safes full of cash and the tapes are not a glitch in the political system. This is the political means-of-enrichment system itself, and it works exactly like that," the entrepreneur emphasizes.

In his view, punishments or imprisonments will not overcome this phenomenon. The only effective solution is to destroy the ground for abuses through total privatization, elimination of unnecessary ministries, and deregulation: "Don’t replace the bad with good, but eliminate the positions themselves: fewer officials, fewer ministries, radically fewer powers."

Oleksandr Derkach, co‑founder of Aval Bank and the Milk Alliance holding

The co‑founder of Milk Alliance does not share the view that this problem can be solved solely through economic measures or legislative liberalization, pointing to the purely criminal nature of the scheme:

"This is plain criminality. Neither reducing the number of officials, nor lowering taxes, nor deregulation will destroy it. Because this criminality is protected (and perhaps even initiated) by a thoroughly rotten law enforcement system working together with top officials."

Vladyslav Smirnov, entrepreneur, lead analyst at EAC "Medical Constructor"

Vladyslav Smirnov stresses that the case demonstrates a qualitatively new level of crisis — the phenomenon of state capture. In this model, a law enforcement body is not simply bribed from the outside: the state function itself becomes part of a commercial service for pressuring competitors and dividing up an illegal market.

The analyst points out that in a number of NABU operations ("Midas," "Dynasty," "Forrest Gump," "Carthage") the same instruments recur — state banks, registers, and the prosecutor’s office. This raises a direct question for the architects of the centralized vertical:

"If the president really knew nothing of all this, then what exactly was being controlled by one of the most centralized presidential systems in modern Ukrainian history? And if he knew, the question becomes entirely different."

Andriy Koboliev, former head of NJSC Naftogaz of Ukraine

The former head of Naftogaz notes that the motive for bribery remains the impunity of officials from past political eras who still remain in power.

He is convinced that relying solely on competitions is futile, because commissions have learned to cheat, and qualified personnel simply do not join such a system. According to Koboliev, public administration is rapidly degrading, and the prerequisite for change is "first and foremost the will from above — not declarative, but real, which is currently not observed."

Svitlana Panaiotidi, former deputy minister of economic development

The former deputy minister of the economy emphasizes a deep social problem — the catastrophic loss of respect for honest work amid a cult of quick success on social media.

She calls the hundreds of thousands of young people employed in fraudulent call centers a consequence of the chronic decline of culture and education: "This generation largely has not been taught to work... The big question is how to teach these children to work — those who now don’t want to; with such development of artificial intelligence they may soon no longer be able to."

Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, former chairman of the board of NEC Ukrenergo

The former head of Ukrenergo points to a paradox: the government’s public campaign against illegal call centers has come down to exposing that it was the prosecutor’s office leadership who were protecting them.

Kudrytskyi summarizes that such schemes are a direct result of systemic negative selection in power: "As a rule, the most loyal, corrupt, and stupid are appointed to positions... So the fact that the prosecutor general protects call centers should neither frighten nor surprise us."

NABU operation "Carthage"

4 September, NABU reported conducting a special operation to expose a criminal organization headed by an employee of the Office of the Prosecutor General.

"Ukrainska Pravda" reported that NABU and the SAP conducted searches at Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko’s, his deputy Mariia Vdovychenko’s, and Odesa OVA head Oleh Kiper’s residences/offices.

On Saturday, 5 September, NABU exposed an organization led by an official of the Office of the Prosecutor General whose members systematically received undue benefits from fraudulent call centers and legalized assets worth tens of millions of hryvnias.

On Sunday, 6 September, Prosecutor General Kravchenko responded to mentions of himself on the "NABU tapes" and denied involvement in possible cover‑ups of illegal call centers and the legalization of funds obtained from their activities in the framework of the NABU and SAP case "Carthage." He also commented on the origin of his assets and his family’s expenses.

According to the investigation, one of the heads of the structural divisions of the OPG created and led a criminal organization in the middle of 2025 year. The organizer of the scheme is the deputy head of the Department of International Legal Cooperation of the OPG, Serhii Kropyva.

In total, five people have been suspected in this case.

What exactly these fraudulent call centers are, how much and how they earn money, Dilo examined.