Open conflict threatens to split the foundation of the post-EuroMaidan Revolution parliamentary coalition one year after its formation. The largest faction consists of the Bloc of President Petro Poroshenko with 139 seats in the 450-seat legislature.
But 15
lawmakers inside the bloc have formed a graft watchdog “to speed up anti-corruption
measures, to counteract corruption within the faction and in parliament, and
enforce the legislature’s oversight of the executive,” lawmaker Viktor Chumak
said while presenting the group at a briefing in parliament on Nov. 25.
The public
still perceives wrongdoing in government as rife, hampering economic
development in the impoverished nation. Chumak said the parliamentary watchdog
will help newly established anti-corruption agencies.
Chumak said
that lawmakers can obtain information more easily that could be used as
evidence in criminal cases. “We have to gain the public’s trust in parliament
as a cornerstone in the fight against corruption,” he said.
The
establishment of the sub-group within the pro-presidential camp came after a
heated faction meeting on Nov. 23, when lawmakers working to dismantle corrupt
schemes accused the faction’s leadership of harassment and watering down
anti-corruption measures.
The
reformists also accused the faction’s leadership, seen as being linked to
industrial-financial groups, of corruption and staging illicit smear campaigns
against them, the Ukrainiska Pravda news website reported.
Criticizing
the new group, lawmaker Sergiy Vlasenko from coalition partner Batkivshchyna
Party, told the Kyiv Post that the anti-corruption group should abandon their
faction if they think its leadership, including the president, are corrupt.
One of the
leading members of the group, lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko, told the Kyiv Post
that the president was “either closing his eyes to corruption or may be corrupt
himself.”
But
abandoning ship would be a gift to the corrupt wing, Leshchenko said. “Now we
can tell them to their faces – that’s more uncomfortable and much more painful
for them than if we were to just write it in a paper,” the former investigative
journalist turned lawmaker said.
The
conflict in the president’s camp has been brewing for some time, Yaroslav
Yurshychyn, political expert at the civic Reanimation Package of Reform group,
told the Kyiv Post. “The party of power was too much of a conglomeration,” he
said.
At the
faction session, Chumak, the deputy chairman of the anti-corruption committee,
opened fire by accusing the deputy heads of the faction, Ihor Kononenko and Serhiy
Berezenko, of organizing a dirty public relations campaign against him,
assisted by Serhiy Pashynsky, the deputy head of Prime Minister Arseniy
Yastenyuk’s People’s Front faction.
Chumak said
that the aim of the inner circle of corrupt rent-seekers is to prevent him from
being appointed to the newly established Agency for the Prevention of
Corruption.
Kononenko
dismissed the criticism and said he was the victim of a smear campaign.
Yurshychyn
said that tycoon Ihor Kolomoisky is trying to take advantage of the discord in
the president’s camp and set the different wings of Poroshenko’s camp against
each other.
Pashynsky,
often accused of being an obstacle to reform, also rejected the accusations.
“We’re building an army here, so I can’t be bothered with pseudo-scandals,” he
said in the hallway of parliament.
At the
faction meeting, Chumak criticized the faction’s response to the obstruction of
key anti-corruption measures. “This is not a faction – it’s a mafia clan,”
Chumak said. “We have to determine whether we are assisting the president in
the fight against corruption, or if we are accomplices.”
Kononenko,
however, said that parliament is not foot-dragging on anti-corruption measures
because lawmakers and their sponsors are concerned that they might face
criminal investigations.
“The
Anti-Corruption Bureau will be fully operational by Dec. 1,” Kononenko said,
also pointing to new police officers and a new investigative bureau as signs of
progress. He said he was expecting a “more powerful fight against corruption.”
Poroshenko
has promised that the key anti-corruption body will work in full from Dec. 1,
but the European Union and the U.S. have been among those criticizing the
watering down of the independence that the bodies need to be able to go after
incumbents.
Presidential
faction leader Yuriy Lutsenko and deputy faction leader Ihor Kononenko defended
the president.
“We had an
open and frank discussion in the faction, and that’s normal – there is no
reason to present this as a scandal,” Lutsenko said, calling the faction “one
team.”
But echoing
Chumak’s statements, Bloc of Petro Poroshenko lawmaker Svitlana Zalishchuk said
there was no way the president’s faction could be one team. Some are in
parliament for personal enrichment, Zalishchuk said, while others are there
because they want to change the country for the better.
Kyiv Post
Staff writer Johannes Wamberg Andersen can be reached at [email protected]
