An all-Ukrainian congress of prosecutors on April 26-28 elected loyalists handpicked by acting Prosecutor General Yury Sevruk to serve on internal regulating bodies, critics say.
The members of the new bodies include protégés of Sevruk and discredited ex-prosecutor generals Viktor Shokin and Viktor Pshonka.
Their opponents say that the bodies, which were created under a 2014 law on prosecutorial reform, will be able to block any efforts to cleanse the prosecutor’s office from corrupt officials because they will have the final say on who gets appointed and fired.
The Prosecutor General’s Office has disputed these accusations, saying the bodies fully comply with democratic procedures. Vladyslav Kutsenko, a spokesman for the office, did not reply to a request for comment.
The congress elected five members of the 11-member Qualification and Discipline Commission, while two members were appointed by a congress of law schools, one was chosen by a congress of lawyers and three will be appointed by the Verkhovna Rada’s human rights ombudsman.
The congress also elected 11 members of the 13-member Council of Prosecutors, while two other members were chosen by a congress of law schools.
The internal regulating bodies will be Sevruk’s puppets and have little to do with democratic procedures, Vitaly Shabunin, head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center’s management board, told the Kyiv Post.
Some of those elected are also linked to disgraced former President Viktor Yanukovych’s Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka.
Serhiy Kostenko, a prosecutor from Mykolayiv Oblast who was elected to the Qualification and Discipline Commission, is an ally of Pshonka’s son Artem, Sergei Hadzhynov, an activist of the AutoMaidan car-based protest group, wrote on Facebook on April 28.
AutoMaidan activists recently rejected Kostenko’s candidacy during a competitive hiring process at Odesa Oblast’s prosecutor’s office, Hadzhynov said.
Kostenko, who is also an ally of Odesa politician Serhy Kivalov, has been accused of seizing the Yunost Hotel and the 7th Kilometer street market in Odesa and of extorting money from businesses for Artem Pshonka, Hadzhynov told the Kyiv Post.
Vera Zaporozhets, an Odesa-based journalist who specializes in courts, also accused Kostenko of seizing businesses and extorting money from them.
“First he freezes assets and puts a person on a wanted list,” she said. “If the person resists, he can be arrested. And gradually he’s siphoning money out of him… He behaves like a gangster.”
She said Kostenko was widely known for arbitrary and lawless actions. Kostenko denies the accusations.
Kostenko has also been accused of having two luxury houses in Odesa, though he denies owning them.
Natalia Babenko, who was elected to the Council of Prosecutors, worked under Pshonka’s notorious deputy Roman Andreyev in 2013-2014. Andreyev was accused of creating the “shadow prosecutor’s office,” which allegedly earned money by seizing businesses.
Serhiy Horbatiuk, head of the department for trials in absentia at the Prosecutor General’s Office, said on April 27 that there were already legal grounds to dispute the results of the congress, as cited by Hromadske television.
He said there had been procedural violations during the congress, and prosecutors had failed to adopt procedural rules.
Horbatiuk said his proposal for all candidates to deliver speeches had been rejected, and prosecutors did not know anything about the people they were voting for.
“The subsequent events give grounds for suspecting that there was certain manipulation because nobody knew these people, and then a certain number of people got almost the same number of votes,” Horbatiuk said.
Hromadske reported, citing its sources, that prosecutors had received text messages with orders on who they should vote for during the congress.
“The prosecutor’s office is finished as an institution,” Tetiana Kozachenko, head of the Justice Ministry’s lustration department, wrote on Facebook on April 28. “The congress of prosecutors is a classical example of rearranging furniture in a brothel.”
She said that “these swindlers deceived everyone: reforms must have taken place before the internal regulating bodies were created… Instead of carrying out a genuine reform, the authorities have allowed the prosecutorial gang to legalize itself.”
Shabunin said he believed that it was necessary to “liquidate these self-regulating bodies along with the prosecutor’s office” because the degradation of this institution had gone too far.
“It’s impossible to reform this prosecutor’s office,” he said, suggesting that it should be replaced with a new agency with a different name. “It’s necessary to dissolve it and start from scratch.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected]
