The National Anti-corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) has said it will add audio recordings and other materials from an investigative report aired by the U.S.-government funded Radio Free Liberty/Radio Europe (RFE/RL) Schemes: Corruption in Details (Schemes) program to its criminal case involving crimes by officials from a number of regional energy companies.

"The audio files and other materials presented in the investigative report of Schemes about corruption in the energy sector will be added to the criminal case NABU is investigating. We are talking here about the case involving wrongdoing by a number of officials from regional energy producing companies (oblenergo) that led to more than UAH 1.2 billion in losses to the state: illegal deals involving electricity," NABU said on Facebook on Saturday.

NABU said two of the persons featured in the report of journalists are the chairman of PrJSC Energomerezha and acting general director of the public joint-stock company Zaporizhia regional energy supply company are already considered suspects. The former was found in Germany and the process for his extradition to Ukraine is underway.

As reported, journalists from Schemes on March 28 claimed that ex-Verkhovna Rada deputy from the Batkivschyna party, Dmytro Kriuchkov, organized the withdrawal scheme in 2015 through the Energomerezha company he headed from state energy supplying companies (oblenergo) in the interests, in particular, of businessmen Ihor and Hryhoriy Surkis, as well as Ihor Kononenko, a parliament deputy from the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko (BPP).

On July 14, 2018, Kriuchkov was arrested in Germany, suspected of embezzling funds of Zaporizhia regional energy supply company. Soon he was released on bail at EUR 100,000, but then he agreed to the extradition procedure and was again imprisoned. NABU, meanwhile, said it was preparing a package of documents necessary for the extradition of a suspect to Ukraine.

On March 29, 2019, Deputy Prosecutor General Yevhen Yenin told the Kyiv-based Interfax-Ukraine news agency that Ukraine's Prosecutor General's Office (PGO) had sent a request to Germany for the extradition of Kriuchkov.