Prosecutor's Office of Transcarpathia starts criminal investigation into priest-defector

As it became known to the UOJ from its sources, the Prosecutor's Office of Transcarpathia started investigation on the case of forgery by the priest of the UAOC Sergei Umantsiv and his lawyer Lubomir Tsebrik. Presumably, Umantsiv and Tsebrik resorted to the forgery of signatures to re-register the statute of Uzhgorod’s religious community of saints equal to the apostles Prince Vladimir the Great and Princess Olga of the UOC into the UAOC.

Sergei Umantsiv, who until March 2016 was a priest of the Kiev Patriarchate and then moved to the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, started judicial proceedings against the community of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Uzhgorod on the plot of land of 40 acres allocated to the community. But during the hearings it became clear that almost all the documents presented by Umantsiv were forged.

According to the lawyer of the Mukachevo diocese of the UOC Dmitri Grinio, this is the first case in the legal practice over the years of Ukraine's independence, when the judge forcibly called the plaintiffs ten times to verify the authenticity of their signatures.

Priest Sergei Umantsiv and his lawyer Lubomir Tsebrik were not present at the sessions.