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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
They point out that banks are effectively preventing enforcement of High Anti-Corruption Court decisions.
A number of human rights organizations demanded that the National Bank of Ukraine stop blocking transfers to the High Anti-Corruption Court’s accounts for payment of bail for suspects, since the possibility of release on bail must be real, not illusory.
The public organizations Kharkiv Human Rights Group, Ukrainian Institute of Human Rights, and Center for Civil Liberties, the public association Helsinki Human Rights Union, the charity Human and Law, as well as the nationwide charitable organization Ukrainian Foundation for Legal Aid, point out that an unacceptable practice has arisen in Ukraine in which a court sets bail for a person, but banks do not allow it to be paid. As a result, the suspect remains in pretrial detention not because of the court’s decision, but because the bank blocks a payment to the court’s official deposit account.
The human rights defenders say the reasons given for refusals seem absurd. They are even rejecting payments of 10, 100, 1 000 hryvnias, as well as payments from lawyers and relatives. On the other hand, when asked about the legal basis for such actions, banks point to "internal rules," and unofficially—to recommendations from the NBU.
"The NBU responds that it itself does not block payments. In the end, supposedly no one is responsible for anything. And a person sits in pretrial detention under court decisions that state they can be released. … In fact, the decision about a person’s freedom is made not by the court, but by a bank," the statement reads.
The organizations emphasized that this violates provisions of both the European Court of Human Rights and the Constitution of Ukraine.
Recently ZN.UA found that despite Vadym Stolar, the suspect in the 'Forrest Gump' case, stating the possibility of paying 300 million hryvnias in bail, banks refuse to process payments to the High Anti-Corruption Court’s accounts. According to ZN.UA sources, refusals come from banks’ financial monitoring units, which designate funds intended for bail payments to the court’s account as risky. In some cases, banks also terminate Stolar’s banking services agreements.
A similar problem arose with payment of bail for another figure in the case, former Deputy Head of the President’s Office Iryna Mudra. She was assigned bail of 20 million hryvnias, but Mudra managed to pay only 5 million of her own funds before her accounts were seized. Her husband tried to pay the rest, but banks refused to process the payments.
In private conversations, bank representatives, according to ZN.UA sources, referred to a recommendation from the central regulator not to process such payments to the High Anti-Corruption Court’s account.
The NBU, for its part, said that "there is no manual intervention," and called the refusals by 15 banks "after a call from the NBU" absurd.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Правозахисники заявили про «неприпустиму практику» блокування банками застав за Столара і Мудру". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: ZN.ua.
