The money that bought a former Ukrainian energy minister his freedom was itself dirtied by money laundering, anti-corruption detectives say, and the trail runs straight back into the president's office.

The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAPO) said they had broken up a criminal organisation run by a sitting and a former lawmaker that pushed UAH150mn ($3.4mn) through the accounts of shell companies at a state-owned bank to post bail for Herman Halushchenko, the former energy and justice minister at the centre of the $100mn Energoatom kickback scheme, Ukrainska Pravda reported on August 19.

Five people were served notices of suspicion under Article 209 of the criminal code, which covers laundering: Iryna Mudra, deputy head of the President's Office; Vadym Stolar, a sitting member of the Verkhovna Rada; Maksym Mykytas, a former one; and two men from the top of Sense Bank, supervisory board chairman Mykola Hladyshenko and management board chairman Oleh Stupak. Four companies put up the cash on June 29 - Hiran Konstrakt (UAH87mn), Tetras Optima (UAH54mn), Skait Riteil (UAH5mn) and Pelet Servis (UAH4mn).

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy dismissed Mudra the same day, Kyiv Independent reported. Her brief at the President's Office was the judiciary and judicial reform.

The agencies gave the case the code name "Forrest Gump" and published a 47-second video explaining it, Interfax-Ukraine reported.

"Only an idiot would put stolen money and tuition payments in their children's names, hence the name 'Forrest Gump'," a voice on the recording says.

Ukraine's anti-corruption agencies have now charged people over the original theft, over the laundering of its proceeds, and over the money used to get one of the accused out of a cell, as the Energoatom case metastasizes over the last nine months. The scandal is bouncing back on Zelenskiy administration where according to a recent poll, Ukrainians are now more worried about corruption in the government than they are of the nightly bombardment by Russian bombs. Half a dozen high profile members of Zelenskiy’s inner circle have been implicated or arrested, with Tymur Mindich, who is a close friend of Zelenskiy’s and was at the heart of the kickback scheme, skipped the country only hours before officers raided his home and now lives in luxury in Israel.

This is the second time since November that detectives have walked into the President's Office itself as part of a corruption investigation, at a moment when Kyiv's EU accession bid rests largely on the credibility of the two bodies doing the walking.

Hlushchenko was remanded in custody on February 17 with bail set at UAH200mn ($4.5mn) after detectives stopped him trying to cross the state border. The High Anti-Corruption Court later cut the figure to UAH150mn, and he walked out at the end of June once the four companies had posted his bail.

Nine months, one scandal

The Energoatom scandal broke on November 10, 2025, when NABU and SAPO said a 15-month investigation using 1,000 hours of wiretaps - Operation Midas - had exposed a network taking kickbacks of 10-15% on contracts at Energoatom, the state nuclear operator, and washing about $100mn through a back office in Kyiv. Investigators gave the participants call signs. Almost every name below carries one.

Tymur Mindich, businessman and co-owner of Kvartal 95, the television studio Zelenskiy founded before politics, is the alleged organiser and answered to "Karlsson". He was tipped off and left the country hours before detectives raided his flat, where they found stacks of cash and a gold toilet. Zelenskiy sanctioned him. He is believed to be in Israel, which does not extradite its citizens, and has called the case against him "a media stunt".

Oleksandr Tsukerman, "Sugarman", ran the laundering back office. He was sanctioned at the same time and is also out of the country.

Hlushchenko, "Professor", was energy minister from 2021 to 2025 and justice minister after that. He was suspended on November 12, 2025, once prosecutors alleged he had helped Mindich move money, and left office. He is the only member of the cast so far to have been detained, released, and then seen his own bail become a criminal case.

Svitlana Hrynchuk lasted under four months as energy minister, from July 17 to November 12, 2025, and resigned as the scandal broke.

Oleksiy Chernyshov, "Che Guevara", was deputy prime minister and national unity minister. NABU charged him in June 2025 with taking bribes from the KSM Group while he ran the communities and territories ministry between 2020 and 2022, and he was released on UAH120mn ($2.7mn) bail; his ministry was dissolved two weeks later rather than his job taken away. In November he was charged again, with illicit enrichment, over more than $1.2mn and nearly €100,000 that detectives say were handed to him and an associate at the Kyiv back office, and a court ordered him held. He denies wrongdoing.

Ihor Myroniuk, "Rocket", a former adviser to the energy minister and former deputy head of the State Property Fund, and Dmytro Basov, "Tenor", Energoatom's former executive director for security, were both put into pre-trial detention. Both deny wrongdoing.

Andriy Yermak ran the President's Office from 2019 and was the most powerful unelected man in the country. Detectives searched his home on the Bankova compound on November 28, 2025, and he resigned that day. On May 12 he was charged with laundering UAH460mn ($10.3mn) through an elite housing development at Kozyn, south of Kyiv, one of whose four villas prosecutors say was meant for him. He was released on UAH140mn ($3.1mn) bail on May 18, wears an electronic tag, has surrendered his passports and may not leave Kyiv. "I haven't fled, nor do I intend to," he said.

A second batch of tapes published in May caught Mindich talking to Serhiy Shefir, Zelenskiy's first aide and one of his oldest business partners, and to Rustem Umerov, defence minister when the recordings were made in the summer of 2025 and now secretary of the National Security and Defence Council. Umerov told parliament on April 28 he had already given investigators every explanation they asked for; his office dismissed "fragmentary recordings of questionable authenticity".

Running alongside Midas is a separate vote-selling case, opened in December 2025, in which four MPs from Zelenskiy's Servant of the People party were charged over cash paid out of a black fund in exchange for votes. The president's friends Yuriy Kisel, who chaired the parliamentary transport committee, and Yuriy Koryavchenkov were among those targeted; former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko was drawn into the same investigation in January.

Mudra is the newest name on the list, and the second person from inside the President's Office to be charged in nine months.

Olha Stefanishyna, a former deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration from 2020 to 2025, is the most recent addition to the list, resigning in August after she became aware that NABU were about to publicly charge her with corruption. Indeed, it was her decision and the impending fresh scandal that would cause that triggered Zelenskiy’s decision to reshuffle the government a week later, according to experts in Kyiv. She was also a former Justice Minister, but was replaced by Hlushchenko and sent her to Washington as ambassador in 2025. Zelenskiy relieved her of that post on August 3 without giving a reason; she said she quit “for personal reasons.” Two days later NABU charged her with illicit enrichment of UAH13.9mn ($310,000) and with false declarations, over two apartments worth almost UAH11mn ($246,000) registered to a friend, plus a parking space, commercial units in a high-end Kyiv complex and a Mercedes-Benz GLC 220 d held in other people's names; between early 2024 and mid-2025 her documented spending of UAH4.2mn ($94,000) ran ahead of UAH3.7mn ($83,000) in declared earnings. The High Anti-Corruption Court set bail at UAH6mn ($134,000) on August 6. She is separately accused of leaning on the 2024 selection panel for the National Agency on Corruption Prevention, still faces a 2019 embezzlement charge dating from her time at the justice ministry under Viktor Yanukovych, and has drawn a further NABU inquiry, so far without charges, into contracts her ex-husband's companies won from the state asset-recovery agency ARMA. No charge connects her to Mindich or Energoatom. "Any procedural actions are part of the lawful work of the law enforcement system and do not amount to a finding of guilt," she said.

Add up the three bail figures - Chernyshov's UAH120mn, Yermak's UAH140mn and Hlushchenko’s UAH150mn - and Ukrainian courts have released three men from this one scandal for UAH410mn ($9.2mn) between them. Prosecutors now say a third of that total was itself criminal money. Stefanishyna was the only one of this group not connected to the Energoatom scandal and her bail amount was an order of magnitude less.

Zelenskiy's own attempt to bring NABU and SAPO to heel has also implicated him in the scandal, although NABU is constitutionally barred from investigating a sitting president. He signed Law 21414 stripping the two agencies of their independence on July 22, 2025, sparking the first street protests of the war and reversed himself nine days later. Everything since has been done by the agencies he tried to close.