Officials from Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau searched the country’s State Financial Monitoring Service as part of an investigation into the agency’s head, Filip Pronin, a suspect in a multimillion-dollar embezzlement scheme, the Kyiv Independent reported Friday.

The searches of Ukraine’s financial intelligence unit are connected to allegations that fortification contracts were used to embezzle 200 million hryvnias ($4.5 million) in state funds, lawmaker Yaroslav Zhelezniak, deputy chair of Parliament’s Finance Committee, told the Kyiv Independent. Zhelezniak published an investigation into the scheme last September.

According to Zhelezniak, the Poltava Regional Administration—then led by Pronin—signed 16 contracts worth about 370 million hryvnias ($8.2 million) with Enki Construction in February 2024 to build fortifications in an unspecified sector of Donetsk Oblast. Working through an intermediary, the contractors allegedly sold barrier pyramids, timber, and other materials at inflated prices. The lawmaker has also accused Pronin of separately scheming to dodge value-added tax through fictitious contracts, the newspaper said.

Pronin led Poltava Oblast from October 2023 until December 2024, when he was appointed to lead the State Financial Monitoring Service, the agency responsible for detecting money laundering and other illicit financial activity in Ukraine. Bohdan Korolchuk, who serves as Pronin’s current deputy and was previously his first deputy in Poltava, is also a suspect in NABU’s pretrial investigation.

“The president should fire him,” Zhelezniak said in the report, arguing it was strange for the official responsible for investigating illicit finance to be implicated in it himself, and predicting both men would be served notices of suspicion.

The probe compounds existing friction between the financial intelligence unit and Ukraine’s anti-corruption bodies. 

NABU Director Semen Kryvonos, who said in November the bureau was investigating Pronin’s potential role in the scheme, has called it suspicious that the agency failed to assist NABU’s defense-sector corruption investigations despite requests sent in early 2025, the news outlet said.

The searches come as Ukrainian anti-corruption investigators scrutinize other oversight institutions. 

In a separate case, RFE/RL reported Friday that wiretap transcripts from Operation Midas show two suspects discussing enlisting Oleksiy Kucherenko, the lawmaker who chaired a parliamentary commission investigating energy-sector corruption, to protect their interests. The probe is seeking to determine whether roughly $112 million was siphoned from state nuclear operator Energoatom through contractor kickbacks.

In a July 2025 intercept obtained by the news organization, suspect Ihor Myronyuk said he would “talk to Kucherenko now” about reversing a government decision that threatened the alleged kickback arrangement. 

The Midas case has already led to the flight of Zelensky associate Tymur Mindich and the arrest of former presidential chief of staff Andriy Yermak, who is out on bail, RFE/RL reported.