President Petro Poroshenko on May 12 appointed Yury Lutsenko, head of the Poroshenko Bloc's faction in parliament, as prosecutor general.
Poroshenko signed a decree on the appointment immediately after the Verkhovna Rada approved Lutsenko’s candidacy.
A total of 264 lawmakers out of parliament’s 421 members voted for appointing Lutsenko.
The vote was held hours after parliament passed a bill tightly tailored to let Lutsenko become prosecutor general by abolishing requirements for prosecutorial experience and a law degree.
“We’re passing a bill narrowly tailored for one person,” Sergii Leshchenko, a reformist lawmaker from the Poroshenko Bloc, said on the Shuster Live show on May 11. “This is savage. In the civilized world, laws are not passed for one person.”
Critics argue that the votes were held at record speed and were accompanied with procedural violations.
The bill was signed within just two hours by both Verkhovna Rada Speaker Andriy Parubiy and Poroshenko. To make it come into effect, an emergency issue of parliament’s official newspaper was immediately printed.
“I don’t believe in the independence of a prosecutor general for whose sake parliament was forced to its knees,” Leshchenko wrote on Facebook on May 12. “They wiped their feet with the Constitution and Ukraine’s international obligations, and two oligarchic clans gave their votes for that.”
The bill allowing Lutsenko to become prosecutor general was passed thanks to the votes of the People’s Will and Vidrodzhennya, factions that comprise ex-members of disgraced former President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. Vidrodzhennya is linked to tycoon Ihor Kolomoisky.
The Poroshenko Bloc has been accused of manipulating the Verkhovna Rada by including some prosecutorial reform-related provisions in the bill to facilitate Lutsenko’s appointment instead of separating them into a separate bill.
Lena Sotnyk, a lawmaker from the Samopomich party, has criticized the bill for delaying the transfer of investigative functions to the State Investigation Bureau and prohibiting the bureau from investigating prosecutors’ corruption without the approval of the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Lutsenko has been trying to present himself as a reformer ready to take on prosecutorial corruption.
During his speech in parliament, he appealed to the values of the 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution, which ousted Yanukovych. He said his experience as a political prisoner under Yanukovych would allow him to reform the notoriously corrupt and politicized prosecution service.
“Lawlessness and political cases must be impossible in the new Ukraine,” Lutsenko said. “… I think that the common energy of everyone who was on Maidan and delegated us to parliament must be used at the prosecutor’s office.”
He also promised to start trials in absentia for Yanukovych and his allies, step up cases against top officials and recruit people from outside the prosecutorial system.
“Lutsenko is the fourth prosecutor general in a row who promised to try Yanukovych but didn’t say a word about current corrupt officials many of which are in parliament,” Leshchenko wrote. “This is surreal and absurd, it looks like death throes.”
During a Q&A session, Lutsenko failed to directly answer questions
on whether he would fire incumbent deputy prosecutor generals accused of
corruption and blocking reform and investigations and whether he would investigate documents on Odesa Mayor Gennady Trukhanov’s alleged Russian citizenship.
He also did not reply to questions on whether he would fire Kyiv’s top prosecutor Oleh Valendyuk, who is subject to dismissal under the lustration law, and his attitude to the bribery case against top prosecutors Oleksandr Korniyets and Volodymyr Shapakin.
Lutsenko also told journalists that he would not reinstate reformist Deputy Prosecutor General Davit Sakvarelidze, who was fired in March.
He said, however, that criminal cases against Sakvarelidze and the Anti-Corruption Action Center were “a disgrace” that discredits the prosecutor’s office. Critics of the prosecutor’s office consider them a political vendetta by Poroshenko and the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Poroshenko’s opponents say that a prosecutor general lacking legal education would be at odds with international standards and that a loyalist of the president will never be able to reform the prosecution service and go after Poroshenko allies.
Yegor Sobolev, a lawmaker from the Samopomich party, said that the party would not vote for Lutsenko because he would never investigate Poroshenko’s offshore schemes or the corruption of his allies.
“We were trying to explain to the president that his friends belong in jail, not in the Prosecutor General’s Office,” he said. “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
The vote was accompanied with cries of “shame” from the Radical Party.
Radical Party leader Oleh Lyashko paraphrased Lutsenko’s statement after being released from jail under Yanukovych that a revolution would happen in half a year – a prediction of the EuroMaidan Revolution.
“With your policy of robbery and corruption, a new revolution will happen in half a year,” Lyashko said, addressing Poroshenko. “You will be overthrown in the same way as Yanukovych.”
Some have also cast doubt on the alleged reformist credentials of
Lustenko, who failed to reform the Interior Ministry when he headed it
in 2005-2006 and 2007-2010.
Poroshenko and his party have consistently rejected proposals to appoint a candidate trusted by civil society as prosecutor general or holding a transparent competition for the job.
