The head of Ukraine’s Football Association, who is a serving member of Uefa’s executive committee, is to be detained for 60 days without bail before a trial on fraud and money laundering charges relating to the construction of an artificial grass factory.
Andriy Pavelko will spend the next two months in a pre-trial detention centre in Lviv after a request from prosecutors, who accuse him of “embezzling” 26.5m Ukrainian Hryvnia (£600,000).
Pavelko was arrested last November for allegedly misusing funds but released after the Ukraine Football Association (UAF) paid bail of £226,000. The Shevchenkivskyi district court in Lviv overruled that decision on Friday.
The decision was condemned by the UAF who described it as “politically motivated” and announced that it would be appealing.
It said in a statement: “We at the Ukrainian Football Association consider this decision to have no legal basis and is politically motivated, and the UAF lawyers have already filed an appeal.
“The transfer of the case from Kyiv to Lviv and the speed of decision-making raise questions not only among lawyers, but also among ordinary people who are not familiar with legal intricacies.
“Also, UAF lawyers will appeal to international institutions in order to prove the groundlessness of the arrest of Andriy Pavelek, who is also a member of the Uefa executive committee. In addition, documents are being prepared for submission to the European court of human rights.”
The allegations against Pavelko follow a four-year investigation into claims of overpayments made by the UAF to a company in the United Arab Emirates that had been working with the national football body to build Ukraine’s first artificial grass factory.
Prosecutors claim that “during the purchase of equipment for the construction of a factory for the production of artificial surfaces for football fields, UAF officials seized UAH 26.5m. Later, they laundered part of these funds.”
Pavelko denies the charges. When they were first made, the UAF accused investigators of acting on behalf of pro-Russian politicians.
Denys Bugai, a lawyer acting for the football body, told the local media outlet Glavkom that overpayments had been made to the company in the United Arab Emirates but that they had later been reclaimed by the football association.
The cash had not re-emerged on the UAF’s balance sheet, he said, as it had been paid via a third company, Softex, to the former Italian referee Pierluigi Collina, who was a creditor. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing by Collina, who oversaw refereeing in Ukrainian football between 2012 and 2015.
Pavelko, who has led the UAF since 2015, served as a member of Fifa’s disciplinary body for two years up to 2020.
According to Fifa, he resigned from the body after being ordered to pay a fine for “publicly criticising a decision” taken by colleagues on the disciplinary committee at the World Cup in Russia. He has kept his position at Uefa after elections at the Uefa ordinary congress in April.
