The Odessa regional prosecutor-general also announced that, at the end of August, another contract killing of a journalist, this time from TV, was foiled when police picked up the assassin during a routine search.
Corruption is rife in Ukraine at all levels of the bureaucracy.
The old Dnipropetrivsk mafiya , which effectively ran the economy in Soviet times, is still largely in place. Only in the past three months has President Leonid Kuchma even started to implement his 1994 election promises of a clean-up campaign. A National Bureau of Investigation has now been established, independent of other law-enforcement bodies, with a particular mandate to seek out and eliminate corruption. In fact, though media allegations of corruption are frequent, they are generally couched in vague terms. A major pitfall is Article 23 of the Law on Information, which bans the gathering of information on a private person or the dissemination of such information without that person's approval.