Every country has its preferred way of getting rid of politicians no longer wanted in top government posts. They can be just fired, or impeached, or forced to resign – the list can be continued.
Ukraine has developed its own sly and efficient method: kompromat.
In Ukraine, the State Security Service, the Prosecutor General's Office, and other law enforcement agencies maintain secret files, where they collect all sorts of interesting information about the country's most highly placed state officials and top politicians. These secret files are known as kompromat.
The special reports include information about these officials' shady pasts; the businesses they control and how they use them to illegally make money; and their activities in their present state job – especially those that can be used to charge a given official with abuse of office in the future.
Often, people know about the special reports being written about them, but can do little to stop it: it's hard to beat the system, which was created decades ago to serve exactly this purpose. The only thing to do is to stay friends with the movers and shakers in this country.
But nothing lasts forever, especially friendships in politics. One day a politician wakes up and discovers that he's in the midst of a scandal.
It's then that journalists find it unexpectedly easy to get access to the documents uncovering the dirtiest facts about the politician in question – even if they had spent the past year in futile attempts to uncover just a tenth of that information.
It's often impossible to tell exactly what agency produced the kompromat document, since it bears no registration numbers, no names and no signatures of the authors.
More often than not these documents end up in the hands of newspapers controlled by conflicting political groups, but neutral parties sometimes may get involved as well.
Most recently, the kompromat technique was successfully applied to dismiss Mykola Dudchenko, the former chief of the giant state nuclear company Energoatom, which runs all of Ukraine's five nuclear plants.
In the beginning of February, at least two newspapers printed a damning report about financial improprieties at Energoatom during Dudchenko's tenure.
The report came from the depths of the Finance Ministry's control department, where it had gathered dust since it was written in August 1998.
Soon after the information was published, Dudchenko and his first deputy were fired, and a thorough investigation was ordered of Energoatom's financial operations.
Now, it seems like the time has come to blacken the name of another senior official, Yulia Tymoshenko, who is deputy prime minister in charge of the energy sector.
A document was recently leaked to the press – including the Post – uncovering 'new' facts about Tymoshenko's relationship with former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko.
Lazarenko, who was premier in 1996-97, fled to the United States last year to escape arrest on charges of abuse of office during his premiership. He is currently kept in U.S. custody, awaiting the outcome of court hearings on his extradition to Switzerland, where he has been accused of money laundering.
A senior official at the General Prosecutor's office looked stunned upon seeing Tymoshenko's kompromat document in the hands of a Post correspondent, but confirmed, speaking under condition of anonymity, that it was originally written by his agency.
Among other things, the document describes the relationship between the company United Energy Systems, which Tymoshenko headed during Lazarenko's premiership, and Sloviansky Bank, whose top executives have recently been arrested on charges of concealing profits.
UES was one of the largest gas traders in Ukraine at the time – its annual turnover estimated at billions of dollars – and also one of Sloviansky's key clients.
The document alleges that UES transferred millions of dollars to the correspondent account of First Trading Bank (Republic of Nauru) in Sloviansky. The money then went though a number of companies and banks, and ended up in Lazarenko's personal bank accounts, according to the document.
Tymoshenko has denied many times UES' connection with Lazarenko, but few believe her. But this is not the reason why she is on the way out of the government.
In actual fact, even fewer people believe her assertions that she has no personal business interests in the energy sector and is genuinely intending to reform it. Although Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko has stubbornly resisted demands from various powerful interest groups in the country to get rid of Tymoshenko, the powers-that-be have decided that she has to go.
According to one highly placed government official, Tymoshenko is going to be 'rotated' into another job rather than fired from the government.
So kompromat remains a useful tool to those in power, and in the case of Tymoshenko, we're seeing it artfully applied.
Katya Gorchinskaya is a staff writer for the Post.
