3,000 ‘postgraduate students’ were enrolled to avoid conscription
An indictment has been filed against nine members of a criminal organisation who, according to the investigation, organised a large-scale scheme to falsely enrol conscripts into postgraduate programmes in order to secure deferrals from mobilisation.
Investigators believe the scheme was organised by the rector and owner of a private university in Zaporizhzhia. His daughter, who held the post of vice-rector for academic and research affairs, was also involved in the scheme, along with three other vice-rectors, the deputy director of one of the institutes, the head of the information systems centre and staff from the postgraduate department.
According to the investigation, the fictitious enrolment was arranged by forging documents, entering false data and illegally accessing the state EDEBO database.
Admission documents were backdated, and the ‘postgraduate students’ themselves did not actually attend any classes.
Over a two-year period, nearly 3,500 men of conscription age were illegally registered through this scheme. Around three thousand of them were granted grounds for deferment from mobilisation.
The investigation also established that the authorised intake quota for postgraduate studies had been exceeded by a factor of 13. The institution was authorised to admit no more than 265 postgraduate students.
The cost of the ‘services’ consisted of the official tuition fee of nearly 20,000 hryvnias for two semesters and a separate unlawful benefit ranging from several hundred to over 260,000 hryvnias per person.
In total, according to law enforcement, the organisers of the scheme received over 50 million hryvnias.
The scheme was exposed after the administrator of the Unified State Electronic Database for Admission (USEDA) detected a suspicious mass registration of applicants and contacted the police. Following this, the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine revoked the university’s licence to train postgraduate students.
All the accused are charged with participation in a criminal organisation, bribery, document fraud, interference with IT systems and obstruction of the lawful activities of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
The organiser of the scheme is also charged with establishing a criminal organisation and laundering illegally obtained funds.
