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Ukraine’s agriculture minister, Mykola Solskyi, has been detained after being named a formal suspect in a multimillion dollar corruption inquiry.
Blighted by severe corruption scandals since the fall of the Soviet Union, Kyiv has pledged to bolster its anti-graft efforts as part of its bid for EU membership.
Solskyi was accused of illegally seizing land worth more than $7m (£5.6m) when he was the head of a major farming company and a member of parliament.
An anti-corruption court ordered him to be held in custody until 24 June, prosecutors said. Bail was set at 75.7m hryvnias ($1.9m).
Solskyi offered his resignation this week and promised to cooperate with the investigation.
Prosecutors said on Friday that they had also charged a dozen other people in the case, including civil servants.
Solskyi, who owned a number of farming businesses, was elected to Ukraine’s parliament in 2019 and was appointed agriculture minister in March 2022.
Several cases of corruption have emerged in Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022, although they have typically involved lower-level officials and been related to army procurement.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy sacked the country’s defence minister last year over a series of procurement scandals in the army.
Separately, prosecutors said they had suspended the deputy head of the regional council in the frontline Zaporizhzhia region for one month. The official was found to have been implicated in a bribery scandal worth at least 650,000 hryvnias ($16,000). Prosecutors said their investigation was ongoing.
