Ukrainian veteran politician Yulia Tymoshenko's party offices were searched by National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) as part of an expanding parliamentary vote-selling corruption investigation on January 14.

“The leader of a parliamentary fraction” has been offering "illicit benefits" to other lawmakers in exchange for votes, Nabu said in a statement. While Nabu didn’t name Tymoshenko directly, Ukrainska Pravda and numerous other reports from Kyiv say that Tymoshenko is the focus of the objection.

Tymoshenko is a former Prime Minister following the Orange Revolution and was jailed by ousted president Viktor Yanukovych over a gas deal she cut with Russia. She was released from jail during the second Euromaidan protests in February 2014, but did not return to office and has remained at the head of her Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party since. NABU searched her party offices on the evening of January 13 as part of the ongoing investigation.

Other sources say a “notice of suspicion” was also served on Servant of the People leader David Arakhamia. According to OBOZ.UA, searches were conducted at the homes of both Tymoshenko and Arakhamia.

The vote-selling scandal broke out on December 28 just as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy arrived in the US for the Mar-a-Lago meeting with US President Donald Trump on December 28, when NABU announced it was investigating half a dozen senior MPs that are members of the president’s Servant of the People party for selling their votes.

Zelenskiy’s government has been rocked by corruption scandals last year, including the $100mn kickback Energoatom corruption scandal that implicated several of his former business partners and lead to the resignation of two ministers and head of Ukraine’s presidential office, Andriy Yermak, his closest ally and the éminence grise of Ukrainian politics. Zelenskiy support is under pressure as a result of these scandals and he is expected to lose a presidential election if one is held this year as part of a ceasefire deal.

Officers from NABU mounted a fresh raid on the elite government quarter in Kyiv on December 27 and reportedly questioned four deputies from Zelenskiy’s Servant of the People party. A fifth deputy, Yuriy Koryavchenkov, a close friend of Zelenskiy, reportedly fled the country hours before the NABU raid on his offices.

Now it appears the investigation has widened to include other parliamentary fractions.

Ukrainians have dubbed Tymoshenko “the gas princess” in connection with claims that while she served as Gas Minister in the Kuchma administration in the 1990s she enriched herself from Ukraine’s gas transit business and is reportedly worth some $350mn.

During that period, she formed the United Energy Systems of Ukraine (UESU) gas trading company that exported gas from Russia and sold it to customers in Europe, becoming a major player in the country’s energy trade. Tymoshenko and UESU were investigated for alleged corruption and financial misconduct in the late 1990s and early 2000s and she was briefly jailed in 2001, but the charges were quickly dropped, and she was released.

She was jailed again following a controversial gas deal with Russia in 2009, during Tymoshenko’s second term as Prime Minister. The deal was signed with then Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to end a gas crisis over unpaid bills that had disrupted supplies to Europe. Yanukovych became President in 2010 after narrowly defeating Tymoshenko in a closely contested election and arrested her in 2011 on charges of “abuse of office” over the terms of the Russian gas deal. The EU lined up behind her and froze aid to Ukraine demanding her release.

In July last year, Tymoshenko's party almost unanimously voted in favour of Law 21414 that would have gutted Ukraine’s anti-corruption organs and strip NABU and its sister organisation, Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), of their independence. After that sparked the first anti-government demonstrations since the war began, Zelenskiy quickly climbed down, nixing the bill. In the follow up vote to overturn Law 21414, Tymoshenko was one of the few MPs who opposed restoring the agencies’ powers.

The case has been preliminarily classified under Article 369.4 of Ukraine's Criminal Code (offering, promising or giving an unlawful benefit), charges which carry a ten-year prison sentence for convictions.

With a trademark Ukrainian hair braid, Tymoshenko was one of the firebrand leaders of the Orange Revolution in 2006 together with Viktor Yushchenko, but her popularity has waned since then. However, she remains a potential presidential candidate if a ceasefire deal with Russia is reached and fresh elections are held, which is one of the points included in the current 27-point peace plan (27PPP) proposed in December at Mar-a-Lago.

The mood in Kyiv is tense with many of the Servant of People MPs failing to turn up for work as the new year get underway, reportly in fear of falling foul of the NABU investigation.

In the evening of January 13, at the first session of the Rada this year, a vote to appoint Denys Shmyhal as the new first deputy prime minister and minister of Energy and to put Mykhailo Fedorov's candidacy for the post of defence minister to a vote failed as insufficient deputies turned up for the vote.

As a result of the investigations, Servant of People is in danger of losing its parliamentary majority and Batkivshchyna is reportedly lobbying for a coalition and taking some ministerial jobs.