The Main Military Prosecutor's Office has opened criminal proceedings against officials of the Antonov state aircraft manufacturing enterprise on suspicion of abuse of office and negligence, resulting in multi-million hryvnia losses. Chief Military Prosecutor Anatolii Matios announced this at a news briefing, the RBC Ukraine publication reports.

"The Main Military Prosecutor's Office has launched and is currently completing the pre-trial investigation of criminal proceedings involving commission of crimes punishable under Articles 367 and 364 of the Penal Code by officials of Antonov," said Matios.

According to him, it has been preliminarily established that Antonov’s losses totaled UAH 502 million in the period from 2006 to 2014 (the company was headed by Dmytro Kiva throughout this period).

According to the Interfax Ukraine news agency, Matios said that Antonov spent UAH 111 million on the development of the An-70 military transport aircraft from 2006 to 2012, "but the aircraft still does not exist."

In addition, during those these same years, Ukraine as a country did not receive a single kopeck as dividends from participation in the operations of the foreign companies Ruslan SALIS and Ruslan International, which are factually sub-contractors and users of the Ruslan military transport aircraft, said the military prosecutor.

As reported earlier, the Ministry of Industrial Policy has repeatedly tried to remove Kiva from his post, but the District Administrative Court of Kiev confirmed Kiva as the head of Antonov in in early September and forbade state registrars to take any action that would change the Unified State Register in connection with Kiva’s post.

Deputy Minister of Industrial Policy of Oleksandr Kalenkov issued orders dismissing Kiva from the post of president of Antonov and appointing Serhii Merenkov as the state enterprise’s acting president in May and July 2014. On 1 August and 3 September, Antonov’s employees expelled Merenkov from the territory of the state enterprise during attempts to seize control of the enterprise.

The Cabinet of Ministers decided on 23 March 2014 to abolish the Ministry of Industrial Policy by merging it with the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade. The merger process has not yet been completed.