The cleansing of the Prosecutor General’s Office of corrupt and unprofessional officials has been blocked, Deputy Prosecutor General Davit Sakvarelidze said in an interview with the Kyiv Post.
Sakvarelidze said the few reformers in the 18,000-member service face intensifying pressure from Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin and his first deputy, Yury Sevruk.
Sakvarelidze further lambasted Shokin at a news briefing on March 24, saying that the prosecutor general could be implicated in the alleged corruption schemes of top prosecutor Oleksandr Korniyets. He said that a copy of Shokin’s passport and his land registration documents had been found in Korniyets’ house.
Prosecutor General’s Office spokesman Vladyslav Kutsenko denied the allegations at a news briefing on March 24 and accused Sakvarelidze of populism.
The distrusted prosecution service, however, is clearly troubled and has failed to combat corruption. Critics say prosecutors, instead, defend corrupt interests.
A competitive hiring process for oblast chief prosecutors had been scheduled to begin in December, while the competition for top jobs at the Prosecutor General’s Office was to have started in February.
But these deadlines have been missed due to pressure on reformers, the failure of last year’s competition for top local prosecutors and uncertainty over who will replace Shokin, said Sakvarelidze, who is supposed to oversee the reform process.
Shokin resigned under pressure on Feb. 16 but remains on the job. Parliament has yet to vote on his fate.
“This political crisis is having an impact on the prosecutor’s office,” Sakvarelidze said. “There’s a complete mess here. The situation is abnormal, and carrying out reform would be nonsensical just now.”
Despite the turmoil at the prosecutor’s office, Sakvarelidze appeared calm as he spoke in his spacious office, which is a few floors above that of his nemesis, Shokin.
Sakvarelidze’s reformers face criminal cases and internal probes against them, and most are now not working. Moreover, the anti-corruption units launched by Sakvarelidze have either been liquidated or paralyzed.
Political will needed
The competitive hiring process for chief local prosecutors held last year failed to renew the prosecutorial system and attract fresh blood.
As many as 87 percent of the top local prosecutors chosen by Shokin turned out to be incumbent top prosecutors and their deputies, and no one from outside the prosecutorial system was hired.
“This reform, if it can be called reform, is less than 10 percent of what we did in Georgia,” said Sakvarelidze, who was formerly a deputy prosecutor general in his native Georgia.
Some lawmakers initially proposed that the commissions for choosing top local prosecutors be dominated by representatives of civil society, but Shokin rejected the idea, Sakvarelidze said.
Eventually, parliament delegated lawmakers and their aides instead of civic activists, while Shokin appointed old prosecutorial cadres who wanted to preserve the current system, Sakvarelidze said.
When the commissions presented candidates to Shokin, Sakvarelidze asked him to choose more young people and renew the system. But Shokin did the opposite, Sakvarelidze said.
Low wages and pressure on reformers were also disincentives.
“A successful lawyer wouldn’t quit his career and good salary amid this unclear situation at the prosecutor’s office,” Sakvarelidze said. “Looking at what’s happening with our team, a reasonable person wouldn’t want to be in the same situation.”
To avoid similar disappointing results in the future, Sakvarelidze proposed more actively involving members of civil society in the reform. Instead of distrusted Ukrainian prosecutors, he suggested that foreign prosecutors and representatives of international organizations take part in the vetting process.
“More radical reform is realistic if there’s political will,” Sakvarelidze said. “It’s realistic if the political elite orders such reforms, and if the prosecutor general has an uncompromising stance on them.”
Pshonka clones
Reform at the prosecutor’s office has stalled as the conflict has intensified between Sakvarelidze on one side, and Shokin and Sevruk on the other.
Shokin has refused to appoint Maryna Tsapok, one of Sakvarelidze’s advisers, head of the reform department, and is now even questioning the need for there to be such a department, Sakvarelidze said.
He characterized the dispute with Shokin and Sevruk as one between the system built by ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s infamous Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka and a post-EuroMaidan generation of reformers.
“There is a Pshonka mentality,” he said. “Until we break it, Pshonkas or Pshonka clones will keep re-emerging in this system.”
Sevruk has been accused of helping to persecute protesters, as he was a deputy head of the department for oversight over the Interior Ministry’s actions during the EuroMaidan Revolution. Sevruk has denied the accusations.
Sakvarelidze blamed Sevruk for effectively giving a green light to police officers’ illegal actions.
“He could have just switched on the TV or walked a few meters to find out that people were being killed, beaten or kidnapped,” Sakvarelidze said.
Under Yanukovych, Sevruk was the right-hand man to Pshonka’s deputy Roman Andreyev, Sakvarelidze said. Andreyev was accused of creating a “shadow prosecutor’s office” used to make money by seizing businesses.
Assault on reform
The latest twist in the conflict came as Prosecutor General’s Office spokesman Kutsenko said last week that the office would investigate the alleged theft of U.S. grants worth $2.2 million allocated to Ukrainian authorities for the prosecutorial reforms overseen by Sakvarelidze.
U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt denied the allegations, saying the money was not supposed to go to the Ukrainian government. Sakvarelidze said most of the money had never been provided because of the Americans’ distrust of Shokin.
The U.S. government has proposed creating a unit for investigating prosecutors’ corruption at the Prosecutor General’s Office, and promised $1 billion in aid to Ukraine if the plan was implemented, Sakvarelidze said.
But Shokin has been dragging his feet on creating the unit, he said.
Sakvarelidze suggested the idea in February 2015, and it took about five months to create two small, understaffed anti-corruption units.
In November the units were replaced by the newly-created General Inspection Service, but most of Sakvarelidze’s reformers have not been transferred to the service and are effectively out of work.
Sakvarelidze said on March 24 that about eight of his 20 anti-graft employees had already been formally fired.
“A full-frontal assault on our team and efforts by the prosecutor general to destroy the General Inspection Service are under way,” he said.
Sakvarelidze told the Kyiv Post that he “went through hell to create this service, but they’re destroying what has been created already.” Sakvarelidze also said that Shokin had appointed his loyalist Maxim Melnychenko as head of the service without consulting him.
In 2014 Melnychenko
was fired under the lustration law, which seeks to fire officials linked to
Yanukovych’s regime, but was subsequently re-instated by a court.
Commenting on the allegations, Kutsenko on March 24 accused some of Sakvarelidze’s prosecutors of links to the Yanukovych regime.
Symbolic case
Moreover, the Security Service of Ukraine has been effectively banned from helping Sakvarelidze’s subordinates after it played a vital role in the arrest of top prosecutors Oleksandr Korniyets and Volodymyr Shapakin last July, Sakvarelidze said.
Viktor Trepak, a deputy head
of the service, resigned under pressure last year after helping Sakvarelidze to
arrest the prosecutors.
Sakvarelidze accused Shokin and Sevruk of consistently trying to derail the case.
“This case is symbolic,” Sakvarelidze said. “It’s a Rubicon. It will lead either to a comeback (of Yanukovych-era prosecutors) or a mini-Maidan.”
Several prosecutors responsible for the Korniyets-Shapakin case have been put out of work, he said. He said there was also “pressure on judges to issue specific rulings.”
Despite
the obstacles, Sakvarelidze’s reformers have managed to open about 22
graft cases against prosecutors, and about half of them have been
arrested and released on bail.
No results in graft cases
Another
blow to Sakvarelidze came as he was deprived of supervision over the
department investigating top officials’ corruption last October.
The
department was liquidated because its functions were supposed to be
transferred to the newly-created National Anti-Corruption Bureau.
But instead
Shokin created another anti-corruption department with the same
functions, Sakvarelidze said. Reformist lawmakers and activists claim
the department was set up for political goals.
Moreover, the
Prosecutor General’s Office has refused to transfer some
high-profile corruption cases to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau.
“The prosecutor’s office has had two-and-a-half years to investigate them and achieve results,” Sakvarelidze said. “Since there are no results and there’s discontent in society, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau has been created.”
One of these cases – on the alleged theft of Hr 450 million worth of oil products seized from tycoon Serhiy Kurchenko – was opened in early 2015 and saw no progress until it was transferred to Sakvarelidze’s subordinates in February, he said.
Lawmaker Serhiy Pashynsky has been accused of involvement in the scheme, though he denies it.
Sakvarelidze said the investigation was being stepped up and
promised that major results would be announced soon.
