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Coffee, 35 thousand dollars and the return of robes: how the Supreme Court annulled the dismissal of three judges in a bribery case
The judicial system once again demonstrated impeccable mutual protection and the ability to save “their own” through virtuoso procedural sleight of hand. While society demands a cleansing of the judiciary and international partners directly tie financial aid to Ukraine to the completion of judicial reform, the country’s highest judicial instance is creating precedents that negate the work of anti-corruption bodies.
This was reported by the DEJURE Foundation.
This concerns the high-profile ruling of the Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court (GC SC), by which fourteen judges effectively annulled the decision of the High Council of Justice (HCJ) to dismiss three judges of the Kyiv Court of Appeal — Ihor Palenyk, Yurii Slyva and Viktor Hlyniany.
This story gained wide publicity at the end of 2023 when the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office exposed four judges of the city appellate court for receiving an improper benefit in the amount of 35 thousand US dollars.
In public discourse the defendants immediately received the telling nickname “coffee judges.” According to the investigation and materials from covert investigative (search) actions, the transfer of bribes took place with particular everyday cynicism: stacks of dollars were packed in coffee bags and disguised in boxes from premium whiskey before being distributed to the offices of the appellate court.
The money was intended for the adoption of a very specific procedural decision — lifting the seizure of two military-transport An-74TK-100 aircraft that belonged to the company EKA GRUPP OU and were operated by Motor Sich JSC and AviaKompanija Konstanta PJSC. The Disciplinary Chamber and the plenary composition of the HCJ promptly imposed sanctions on the servants of Themis in the form of a submission for dismissal, finding their conduct to undeniably tarnish the title of judge and undermine the authority of justice. It seemed the disciplinary period was closed and the only thing left was the verdict of the High Anti-Corruption Court, where the criminal case is currently being heard.
However, the Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court came to the colleagues’ defense. Under the cover of concern for “European standards” and the “right to be heard,” the highest judicial instance annulled the HCJ’s decisions following the complaints of the suspects. The case is being returned to the HCJ for reconsideration, which not only opens a direct path for the coffee judges to keep their positions, lifetime benefits and pensions, but also creates grounds for paying them roughly 9 million hryvnias in compensation from taxpayers’ pockets for so-called “forced absence” — and this amid a colossal state budget deficit.
This verdict provoked expected outrage from the legal community and the civic sector. As specialized commentators note, such precedents signal the beginning of an unabashed revenge by the judicial corps, which is ready to negate anti-corruption legislation in order to preserve internal caste immunity.
Anatomy of the bribe: Motor Sich planes, whiskey and coffee bags
To fully appreciate the absurdity of the Supreme Court’s decision, it is worth returning to the facts of the disciplinary proceeding set out in the decisions of the Second Disciplinary Chamber of the HCJ and the rulings of the investigative judges of the High Anti-Corruption Court. In the summer of 2023 the Pechersky District Court of Kyiv partially granted a motion by the defense-related prosecution and seized strategic property — two An-74TK-100 aircraft equipped with D-36 engines and auxiliary power units. In the context of the full-scale invasion, such a seizure was of considerable importance for preserving aviation assets.
Representatives of the airline filed an appeal that, after automatic allocation, was assigned to a panel of the Kyiv Court of Appeal composed of presiding judge-rapporteur Ihor Palenyk, as well as Viktor Hlyniany and Yurii Slyva. According to NABU detectives’ materials, another judge of the same court — Viacheslav Dziubin — joined the case. He acted as an intermediary and proposed to resolve the issue of lifting the seizure for a fee of 35 thousand US dollars: 10 thousand for each panel member and 5 thousand for himself for his “labors.”
Panel of the Kyiv Court of Appeal (left to right) Ihor Palenyk, Yurii Slyva and Viktor Hlyniany, 11 October 2023. Photo: Stas Yurchenko, Hromadske/Graty
Wiretaps and operational video recordings captured every step of the judicial scheme. On 13 November 2023 Dziubin entered Palenyk’s office and announced the proposal to receive money for lifting the seizure from the aircraft of the company Konstanta. Palenyk agreed, and in the following days he sequentially spoke with Slyva and Hlyniany. As recorded in the covert investigative action protocols, the panel members expressed full agreement. On 27 November 2023 the panel dutifully issued a ruling granting the appeal and lifted the seizure from the planes, announcing the operative part.
The next morning, 28 November, Dziubin received the agreed 35 thousand dollars from the appellant’s representative in the cabin of his Lexus. Returning to his official office, he kept part of the take for himself and packed 25 thousand dollars into a cardboard whiskey box and brought it to Palenyk’s office. Palenyk took the package home, repackaged the money, exchanging banknotes for others from his personal reserves, and divided 16 600 dollars into two equal parts of 8 300 dollars for Slyva and Hlyniany. The next day, 29 November, these funds were handed to the colleagues in coffee bags right in the courthouse on Solomianska Square. NABU detectives and SAP prosecutors caught the defendants red-handed while seizing marked banknotes.
Despite such exhaustive materials from covert investigative actions obtained under the sanction of a High Anti-Corruption Court investigative judge, the accused in their complaints to the HCJ and the Supreme Court sought to present everything as a “routine professional exchange of views among lawyers about the circumstances of the case.” Moreover, the judges’ defense insisted that covert investigative materials could not be used in disciplinary proceedings without a criminal conviction, attempting to substitute standards of professional judicial ethics with the presumption of innocence from criminal procedure.
Procedural trick with timing and how absence became grounds for rescue
When the HCJ considered the judges’ appeals against the sanction, the defense adopted a classic Ukrainian judicial-practice delaying tactic. The hearing was scheduled five times. Twice the consideration was postponed due to lack of quorum and delays in handling other matters, and twice — on 23 January and 6 February 2025 — the HCJ granted motions by the judges to postpone because they had been summoned to the High Anti-Corruption Court for preparatory hearings in the criminal case at the same time.
The decisive session was on 11 March 2025. It was set for 10:00 a.m. However, the day before, on 10 March, the High Anti-Corruption Court scheduled a hearing in the judges’ case for 16:30. The appellants — Palenyk, Slyva and Hlyniany’s attorney — again sent motions to the HCJ to postpone and simply did not appear at the council session at 10:00. The logic was simple: relying on the fact that their matter was listed far down the preliminary agenda at number 14, they decided that by 16:30 it would not be their turn and thus they could ignore the quasi-judicial body altogether.
However, the HCJ acted decisively: knowing the judges had been summoned to the High Anti-Corruption Court for the afternoon, the council used procedural rules to change the order of business and set consideration of the coffee judges’ appeals as the second item — immediately after staffing matters. The review was to take place in the morning, leaving the accused more than six hours before the trip to the anti-corruption court. Since the judges did not arrive and provided no valid reasons for absence at 10:00 a.m., the HCJ, by majority vote, denied the motions to postpone, reviewed the case materials on the basis of the documents on file and left the submission for dismissal unchanged.
It was this episode that most of the Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court turned into heavy artillery against the High Council of Justice. The GC SC judges concluded that the HCJ had committed a “substantial procedural violation” because reviewing the complaints without the personal presence of the appellants violated their right to be heard. The Grand Chamber majority ignored the fact that there was a 6,5-hour gap between the start of the HCJ session and the hearing at the High Anti-Corruption Court, and the appellants did not even claim they lacked the physical ability to come in the morning.
In effect, the Supreme Court legalized an outright procedural demarche: persons accused of corruption can willfully ignore a disciplinary body’s session, excuse themselves by citing a hearing in another court later in the day, and then successfully appeal verdicts on the grounds that they were “not allowed to be heard.” This creates a dangerous loophole for torpedoing any disciplinary cases against the judicial nomenklatura.
Separate opinion of four — exposing the majority’s manipulations in the Grand Chamber
The Grand Chamber’s ruling was not unanimous. Four judges — Serhii Pohrybnyi (who presided in the proceedings), Olha Buleiko, Anatolii Yemets and Oleh Tkachuk — showed principle and issued a lengthy separate opinion that left nothing of the majority’s argumentation standing. Their position reads as a crushing condemnation of the methods by which the highest judicial instance seeks to save corrupt judges.
The first and main argument of the dissenting judges concerns the limits of the Supreme Court’s powers. The Law of Ukraine “On the High Council of Justice” (article 52) contains an exhaustive list of four grounds on which the council’s decision about a disciplinary sanction may be annulled: lack of HCJ’s competence, absence of members’ signatures, improper notification of the judge about the session, and absence of reasoning or references to law in the decision. The Grand Chamber itself noted that the judges had been properly notified and that the first two grounds did not exist. Yet the majority simply invented a new ground — “substantial procedural violation due to failure to ensure participation,” which the law does not provide for at all.
Second, the authors of the separate opinion demonstrated that the judges’ right to be heard was not violated at all. At the session of the Second Disciplinary Chamber of the HCJ back in October 2024, representatives of judges Palenyk and Slyva gave extensive oral explanations. At the stage of appeal to the council plenary, the judges and their attorneys submitted detailed written complaints, objections and motions. Moreover, on 4 March 2025 the Slyva, Hlyniany and their defenders personally took part in an HCJ session. The majority’s claim that the appellants were “never heard” was, the authors of the separate opinion say, completely inconsistent with the actual case materials.
Third, the minority judges emphasized the abuse of procedural rights by the accused. The appellants’ non-appearance on 11 March at 10:00 a.m. was not caused by any objective obstacle, since the summons to the High Anti-Corruption Court was set for 16:30. As noted in the separate opinion, decisions of the European Court of Human Rights place on parties the duty to use procedural rights in good faith and not to resort to delaying tactics. The HCJ’s moving of the matter to the start of the agenda was done specifically to have time to consider the issue long before the WCAC hearing.
Judges Pohrybnyi, Buleiko, Yemets and Tkachuk also exposed a scheme the defense tried to implement regarding Viktor Hlyniany. During the Supreme Court hearing the defense counsel claimed the judge had reached 65 years of age and had been removed from the judicial staff into retirement, and therefore could allegedly no longer be dismissed for a disciplinary offense. The authors of the separate opinion rightly pointed out: at the time the offense was committed, the case was opened and the Disciplinary Chamber adopted its decision, Hlyniany had full status as a judge. Delay at the appeal stage should not grant a person privileges, because otherwise any judge approaching retirement age could take bribes with impunity simply by dragging out appeals in the HCJ until reaching 65 years.
Judicial restoration — 14 surnames and a new loophole for the unscrupulous
The Grand Chamber’s decision in the coffee judges’ case was not merely an act of help for colleagues — it instantly opened the floodgates for saving other odious figures. Anti-corruption experts note that the precedent has already been actively adopted by defendants from the disbanded Kyiv District Administrative Court (KDAC). Judges Yevhen Ablov and Ihor Kachur have begun massively ignoring HCJ summonses, demanding endless postponements and citing the Grand Chamber’s verdict that the council is “obliged to hear them personally.”
This process becomes particularly cynical when you look at the names of those who voted to annul the sanction against the corrupt. The annulment of the HCJ decision was supported by 14 judges of the Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court:
It was their signatures that returned the scandal’s defendants a chance to avoid disciplinary responsibility.
Such decisions demonstrate a deep institutional crisis in the very reformed Supreme Court. Instead of setting the highest standards of integrity, the highest judicial instance is turning into an advocate for toxic personnel in lower courts. Previously the Supreme Court had already saved dozens of so-called “Maidan judges,” allowing them to circumvent qualification assessment, and now it has moved to directly rehabilitate those caught red-handed with stacks of dollars in coffee bags.
A state that fights for its physical survival every day and requires colossal macrofinancial support from allies cannot afford such demonstrative impunity. When the Supreme Court invents artificial procedural hooks to avoid noticing a bribe of 35 thousand dollars, it delivers a verdict not only on a specific HCJ decision but on society’s trust in justice as such. Real cleansing of the judiciary will remain a distant prospect as long as the highest judicial offices are held by people ready to defend corporate solidarity at the cost of the nation’s dignity.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Кава, 35 тисяч доларів і повернення мантій: як Верховний Суд скасував звільнення трьох суддів у справі про хабар". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: ANTIKOR.
