Finance Minister Oleksandr Danylyuk on April 21 admitted that he had failed to include his links to offshore companies in his property declaration, saying he had made a mistake.
Natalie Sedletska, a Ukrainian journalist with Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty, discovered that Danylyuk was still a director of
two Cypriot companies, Rurik Real Estate Investment Limited and Hogsmill
Investment Limited, which were founded by a firm registered in the
Cayman Islands. She posted screenshots of Cypriot registers with
information on Danylyuk on April 21.
Danylyuk said he was also a director at the Cayman Islands company.
Under
Ukrainian law, Danylyuk should have declared any income from his jobs
at the Cypriot companies, Inna Rydnyk, a lawyer at the Lavrynovych and
Partners law firm, told the Kyiv Post.
Another possible
violation is that, under the law on preventing and fighting corruption,
ministers are banned from having jobs in business, she said.
Punishment
for these violations could be a fine, reprimand or dismissal, Rydnyk
added. Criminal liability is unlikely unless large amounts of money are
involved.
Danylyuk said that he worked with the companies as a hired
manager before 2010, when he moved back to Ukraine from the U.K. He
said that he wasn’t aware that he was still legally involved with the
companies.
“I didn’t declare the companies because I was sure
that my partners removed me from (the documents) in 2010,” Danylyuk said
in an explanation he published on Facebook on April 21.
He said he
would correct his declaration and wanted to “apologize to society,”
saying that he “should have correctly declared this information.”
He added that his partners and lawyers were now completing the procedure of dismissing him from his positions in the companies.
“I
agreed to head the Finance Ministry to carry out a deep reform of
public finances,” Danylyuk wrote. “That’s why I intentionally continue
to correct my mistakes and publicly account for them in order not to
give my opponents a single tool of pressure on me, and thus create
obstacles to important reforms, as well as to serve as an example of
openness for others.”
Danylyuk, a co-founder of the Kakha
Bendukidze Free Market Center think tank, has advocated reforms aimed at
introducing free markets, stabilizing the financial system, and
carrying out transparent privatization of state-owned enterprises.
However,
he has also been criticized for working for the disgraced ex-President
Viktor Yanukovych. He was an advisor on economic reforms to Yanukovych
in 2010-2014. He was also a deputy head of President Petro Poroshenko’s
administration in 2015-2016.
The reports follow the scandal
around Poroshenko’s offshore company in the British Virgin Islands. The
Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a Kyiv Post partner,
on April 3 reported the existence of Poroshenko’s offshore company in
the wake of a massive leak of documents from Panama’s Mossack Fonseca
consulting firm.
So far, Poroshenko’s lawyers have been unable to provide evidence that Poroshenko was not required to declare the firm.
