The subject matter of this dispute is the recovery in favor of a former prosecutor of underpaid salary for the period from March to September 2020, which the employer calculated on the basis of a government resolution rather than in accordance with the special law on the prosecution service.
**** In this case, the Supreme Court took into account the change in legal approaches and the decisions of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, which declared unconstitutional the restriction of the level of material support for prosecutors through sub-legislative acts of the government. The Court emphasized that a prosecutor’s salary is a key guarantee of their independence, and therefore its amount must be determined exclusively by law rather than by resolutions of the Cabinet of Ministers. Since the provisions restricting payments to the plaintiff contradict the Constitution of Ukraine, the courts should have applied the provisions of the Basic Law as provisions of direct effect. The panel of judges also noted that the proper defendant in the case is precisely the regional prosecutor’s office where the plaintiff was directly employed, rather than the Office of the Prosecutor General. At the same time, since the courts of lower instances did not examine the financial calculations at all and did not establish the exact amount of the debt, the Supreme Court was unable to independently render a final decision on the merits of the recovery of funds.
The Supreme Court partially satisfied the plaintiff’s cassation appeal, vacated the decisions of the courts of first and appellate instances, and remanded the case for a new consideration to the court of first instance for the exact calculation of the underpaid salary amount.
