Ukraine’s anti-corruption court upholds 6-year term for ex-tax chief in gas scheme

Ukraine’s post-2014 anti-corruption system was built on a bet: that a country with deeply corrupt courts could create clean ones from scratch. On 2 April, the bet paid off.

The High Anti-Corruption Court (HACC) appeals chamber confirmed a six-year prison sentence for Roman Nasirov, former head of the State Fiscal Service (SFS), for abuse of power in a gas pricing scheme.

The chamber partially upheld defense appeals—excluding testimony from one witness—but left the sentence unchanged, along with a UAH 17,000 ($389, at the current rate of UAH 43.70 to the dollar) fine and a three-year ban on holding public office. Nasirov is now serving his sentence.

The verdict settles a question that has hung over Ukraine’s anti-corruption system since 2017: whether the new courts could take a case all the way—arrest, conviction, confirmed appeal—against a senior official before the statute of limitations expired.

Anti-corruption reform is a formal prerequisite for Ukraine’s EU accession talks—and, by extension, for the billions in Western financial support that sustain Ukraine’s war economy.

How Nasirov helped drain the state treasury

According to published case records, the scheme centered on natural gas sold at below-market prices by state-owned Ukrhazvydobuvannia to three private firms controlled by then-MP Oleksandr Onyshchenko, who fled Ukraine in July 2016 before he could be arrested.

The companies bought gas on sham commodity exchanges, resold it at market rates, and kept the spread while the state absorbed the loss. Nasirov ordered regional SFS offices in Kharkiv, Poltava, and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts to file false assessments claiming the three firms faced imminent bankruptcy—when in fact they were consistently profitable.

Two independent forensic economic reviews found that his actions between May 2015 and March 2016 could have caused the state to forgo over 2 billion hryvnias ($45.8 million). His co-defendant, former SFS department head Volodymyr Novikov, was acquitted; the appeals chamber left that finding unchanged.

Nine years, six in court

The case ran for nearly nine years, six of them in courts. Files sat in ordinary Kyiv courts for two years before moving to the HACC in October 2019, where first-instance judges convicted Nasirov on 31 October 2025, according to court records.

Euromaidan Press reported in March 2017 that Nasirov’s initial detention was the first-ever arrest of a sitting top official since Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity.

That first-instance verdict came just six months before the statute of limitations on the main charge would have expired, according to the Anti-Corruption Action Centre, which tracked the case throughout. The appeals panel inherited the same deadline.

Nasirov did not make it easy. When National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) detectives arrived at Kyiv’s Feofaniia clinic on 2 March 2017 to serve the suspicion notice, he allegedly suffered a “myocardial infarction”—a diagnosis a Health Ministry expert commission later disputed.

He was wheeled into his first court hearing in a plaid blanket. In April 2025, as closing arguments proceeded, he enlisted in the armed forces; the military police annulled the order the following day, ruling it unlawful, according to the court records.

What the verdict means

Euromaidan Press reported that MPs, judges, and at least one former minister had all been convicted by the HACC before Nasirov, with the court’s guilty verdict rate at 89% across more than 200 cases and just 18 overturned on appeal.

The Anti-Corruption Action Centre called the Nasirov outcome a test of whether the court could prosecute its highest-profile defendants. The Centre said the court passed.

What comes next

Court records show Nasirov faces a second HACC trial. NABU charged him in October 2022 with accepting 722 million hryvnias ($16.5 million) from agricultural holding owner Oleh Bakhmatiuk in exchange for VAT reimbursements for Bakhmatiuk’s companies. That case—consolidated with a related proceeding—is ongoing.