Access to banking information of AB “Shkrebets and Partners”

The court granted the Office of the Prosecutor General access to the banking information of AB “Shkrebets and Partners”. We spoke with the firm’s partner Oleksii Meniv, dug into the available materials, and have something to say.

What happened

Yesterday the firm posted on its Facebook that there was an unlawful ruling ordering access to its banking secrecy. They say this is not the first attempt to obtain temporary access: in April 2024 and in March 2026 the court refused the detectives of the Bureau of Economic Security (BEB) in similar motions. And now the court has granted it.

Oleksii Meniv says the firm has been working for Kharkiv city utility companies for more than 10 years. They have about 20 such clients in their portfolio.

At the beginning of 2024, the BEB developed doubts about whether legal services were actually provided. Those doubts are based on an indisputable and ironclad argument; it goes like this: “most municipal enterprises in the city have in-house legal counsel positions whose duties include representing the interests of these enterprises.” Thus, the BEB opened proceedings under Part 5 of Article 191 of the Criminal Code. The total amount of damages that, according to the BEB, the firm caused the state is about UAH 40 million.

Immediately after the investigation was opened, the investigating judge granted several motions by detectives for temporary access to clients’ documents and, as Mr. Meniv says, the clients provided all information about the services rendered. Representatives of all clients were also interviewed as witnesses.

This time the court granted a motion for access to information not of the clients but of the firm itself.

And the biggest problem is that the ruling calls for disclosure of all banking information of the law association for the period from January 1, 2024 to December 31, 2025 concerning all payments, not only those related to municipal enterprises.

What is wrong with the ruling?

Yes, there is certainly a violation on the part of the state, and the prosecution will hide behind the argument that “this is not access to attorney-client privilege because the statement-of-account owner is the bank, not the attorneys.” But that is a legally weak argument and it directly contradicts the European Court of Human Rights’ case law.

1. Scope of information

Two years ago the investigation already obtained access to the documents of the municipal enterprises themselves and, as Meniv told us, questioned representatives of all municipal enterprises that are mentioned in the proceedings.

So the prosecution has documents from the payers’ side. It only remains to reconcile them with the recipient’s documents. For that, access to the firm’s transactions specifically with those municipal enterprises is sufficient; their EDRPOU identifiers are known to the investigators and the list is limited.

Instead, the ruling concerning the Shkrebets group covers absolutely all accounts of the law association for two years without distinguishing payments from municipal enterprises and payments from other clients: it’s a blunt repeat of the Sommer case.

In Sommer v. Germany the European Court of Human Rights ruled on violations during scrutiny of a defense lawyer’s professional bank account. In §57 of the judgment the Court noted that the prosecution’s requests covered all information about the lawyer’s bank account and transactions over a period of more than two years, and that the only limitation concerned the time period, while the content of the access was uncontrollably broad.

The ECtHR has previously spoken about attorney-client privilege: in Brito Ferrinho Bexiga Villa-Nova v. Portugal, which concerned tax authorities’ access to a lawyer’s bank accounts in a tax audit, the Court found that inspecting a lawyer’s bank statements constitutes an interference with the right to respect for professional secrecy, which falls within the notion of private life under Article 8 of the Convention. Portugal was found in violation because the lawyer was not involved in the lifting of secrecy, the bar association was not consulted, and there was no effective judicial review.

2. The circumstances have not changed

In 2024 and then in March 2026 the court refused detectives in two similar motions.

About a month passed between the second refusal and the third attempt. During that time, as the rulings show, no new factual circumstances appeared. The only significant difference is the signature of the Deputy Prosecutor General instead of the BEB detective. That means the motion was granted not because new evidence of material significance appeared (as required by paragraph 2 of Part 5 of Article 163 of the Criminal Procedure Code), but because the initiating subject changed.

This is not an evidentiary issue but a procedural one, and it is a separate question for the investigating judge.

3. Insufficient protection of attorney-client privilege

As a state we are stepping on these same rakes again. The ECtHR has repeatedly stated that Ukrainian legislation has a systemic defect in protecting attorney-client privilege in banking data due to poor-quality law. Ukraine persistently and consistently does nothing about this, so this is a problem broader than the violation of a single investigating judge.

But a structural problem in no way excuses either the judge or the prosecution.

Part 2 of Article 23 of the Law “On the Bar and Legal Practice” requires a court decision to compulsorily specify the list of items and documents that are planned to be seized. The formula “all documents about all transactions across all accounts” is a disguise for a list.

The court should have summoned a representative of the regional bar council to the hearing. The guarantees that follow from the logic of Article 23 of the Law, in my view, reasonably apply to situations where temporary access affects attorney-client privilege, even if formally the owner of the documents is a third party (the bank).

The fact that the motion was signed by the Deputy Prosecutor General (and not a BEB detective, as in the two earlier refusals) formally satisfies the requirement of paragraph 3 of Part 1 of Article 23 regarding the initiating subject. But that is only one guarantee among several. The rest — the list, involving the bar, proportionality — were successfully neglected.

Therefore, there are more than enough grounds to speak of violations of guarantees of legal practice in the April 10 ruling.

To the weakness of procedure is added the weakness of the version itself.

The investigation builds the alleged sham nature of the services mainly on the fact that the Kharkiv city council has its own legal department and municipal enterprises have in-house legal counsel. That is not standalone proof. Having in-house counsel does not exclude a contract with an external lawyer, especially in complex disputes.

This is a common and perfectly lawful practice. A presumption of sham transactions should be based on evidence of the absence of actually performed services — i.e., fake acts, non-existent lawsuits, failures to appear in court. None of that appears in the public part. In two years none of the lawyers has been notified of suspicion. If evidence existed, a suspicion would already have been filed.

But there’s more

The April 10, 2026 ruling concerns a number of anonymized law bureaus. In the anonymized text of the rulings there is not a single word about the law association.

However, in the firm’s post that is now circulating on social media, the claim is about access to the accounts of the law association itself. This creates some additional interpretations, and none of them are very convenient.

1. Substitution of the narrative

The first interpretation is a banal substitution of the subject in the media narrative.

The law association “Shkrebets and Partners” (EDRPOU 38631544) and the law bureaus operating around it; we identified at least three of them that belong to active lawyers/attorneys of the Shkrebets group: AB “Meniva Oleksii”, AB “Volodymyr Vynogradov” and AB “Anton Novakov”.

If the ruling indeed concerns only the law bureaus, then the law association is not a party whose rights were directly limited by the court. That, in turn, means that the association has no right to challenge this ruling, has no grounds for a complaint to the High Council of Justice or the ECtHR, and cannot claim the inadmissibility of the evidence obtained, because that is the right of the respective law bureaus.

2. Ukrainian Verein — reversed

The second interpretation is that the public post may be an implicit admission that the law association and the law bureaus constitute a single economic unit.

If so, it should be frankly said that this is a possible business optimization. We do not condemn it, because many operate this way on the market. But such a structure — a front law association with reputational and tender capital plus a network of satellite law bureaus on a 5% single tax to split cash flows — is typical for regional practices in the field of public procurement.

By our calculations, the group of legal entities associated with the “Shkrebets and Partners” brand won 168 tenders at municipal enterprises of the Kharkiv city council for a total of about UAH 94 million; the association itself won a little more than half of those tenders for UAH 52 million; the rest were won by the law bureaus.

So, an honest assessment of the situation is a triplet.

• On the merits the firm’s position is strong. Ukraine has a structural problem with protecting attorney-client privilege in banking data, and this is not my opinion but the ECtHR’s finding. The April 10 ruling is excessive in scope, lacks a list, lacks involvement of the regional bar council, and makes possible the disclosure of the client base to an extent far beyond the subject matter of the evidence.
• But in public discourse the position is not entirely transparent. As the Kharkiv People’s Theatre of the Absurd “Horobchyk” likes to say: “more questions than answers.” Did the prosecution simply make a mistake and confuse the association with the bureaus? From whom exactly is the BEB requesting information?
• Third, both theses do not exclude one another. One can simultaneously consider the ruling a gross violation of Article 23 of the Law “On the Bar” and Article 8 of the Convention, and also consider that the public rhetoric of AB “Shkrebets and Partners” goes beyond what fairly follows from the text of this specific ruling. In a normal scenario both points would be publicly voiced by the National Association of Advocates of Ukraine, the Council of Advocates, and the regional bar qualification commission.