As the drive to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin gains momentum, the discredited and distrusted official has opened an embezzlement case against one of the country's most prominent anti-corruption groups.
The investigation against the Anti-Corruption Action Center,
which has consistently criticized Shokin’s performance, will reignite the
scandal around the prosecutor general. Critics say that the investigation is
bogus and is aimed at putting pressure on the critical non-governmental
organization.
Shokin’s spokesman, Vladyslav Kutsenko, denied there was a
political character to the investigation.
Shokin, a loyalist of President Petro Poroshenko, submitted his
resignation in mid-February, but voting to approve it will not happen in
parliament until March 29. A rally in favor of dismissing Shokin and appointing
an independent prosecutor general is to be held in front of the presidential
administration on March 28.
Kutsenko shocked the public on March 26 by saying that Shokin
would remain prosecutor general after March 29, as there are not enough votes
in parliament for his dismissal.
Political vendetta?
As the uproar over Shokin was intensified, Kyiv’s Pechersky
Court earlier this week gave the Prosecutor General’s Office permission to
seize Anti-Corruption Center’s documents and other items, and allowed
prosecutors to access the center’s banking records, transactions and financial
documents, according to the official register of court rulings.
The ruling was issued as part of an embezzlement investigation
into money allocated by the U.S. government for reforming the prosecution
service.
The Prosecutor General’s Office said on March 16 that it would
probe the alleged theft of U.S. grants worth $2.2 million allocated for a
competitive hiring process for the prosecution service. Critics see the
investigation as an effort to pressure Deputy Prosecutor General Davit
Sakvarelidze, who oversees the reform.
Kutsenko’s allegations were denied by Geoffrey R. Pyatt, the
U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. He said the funds were not intended to go to the
Ukrainian government.
The U.S. gave about $200,000 to the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development and another $2 million to the International
Development and Law Organization, he added.
The Anti-Corruption Action Center has obtained $189,000 from the
U.S. Embassy through the International Development and Law Organization to
monitor and train detectives of the Anti-Corruption Bureau and the
anti-corruption prosecutor’s office, Vitaly Shabunin, head of the center’s
management board, said on March 25.
Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of the center, said the NGO
had not received any funds for the competitive hiring process for prosecutors.
The investigation is being carried out by the anti-corruption
department set up in February and supervised by Deputy Prosecutor General Yury
Stolyarchuk, reformist lawmaker from the Bloc of President Petro Poroshenko Serhiy
Leshchenko wrote on Facebook on March 25.
The department is effectively overseen by Poroshenko Bloc lawmaker
Ihor Kononenko and his ally Oleksandr Hranovsky, who is staffing the unit with
his proteges, Leshchenko added. Kononenko and Hravnovsky face large-scale
corruption accusations, although they deny them.
The investigation follows the publication by Shabunin on March
23 of what he says is a letter from Shokin to top prosecutors instructing them
not to transfer graft cases to the newly-created National Anti-Corruption
Bureau.
“This can only be
interpreted as pressure on the organization,” Shabunin said on March 25.
“Shokin is expected to be replaced with one of Shokin’s deputies – Stolyarchuk
or (Yury) Sevruk, who are severely criticized by the Anti-Corruption Action
Center.”
Kutsenko denied claims that there was a political vendetta,
saying that the prosecutor’s office was required by law to check the NGO
because of requests about the U.S. funds sent by Verkhovna Rada members.
“We will just make copies
of their documents, and it will not block the center’s work,” he told the Kyiv
Post. “Nobody is talking about arrests, searches or repression.”
Kaleniuk told the Kyiv Post that prosecutors could have obtained
a permit to wiretap the NGO, although Kutsenko said that he was not aware of
such a permit.
“Poroshenko is flying away
to the United States next week,” she said. “He will be in a very uncomfortable
and difficult situation there (due to Shokin’s actions). And if Poroshenko
thinks that Shokin’s dismissal alone will satisfy us and Ukraine’s foreign
partners, he’s mistaken.”
She said that Sevruk and Stolyarchuk were Shokin’s “tentacles,”
and replacing Shokin with either of them “would not change anything.”
Sevruk may stay as acting prosecutor general for an indefinite
period, while Stolyarchuk is reportedly the main candidate to replace Shokin,
with Poroshenko supporters promoting his candidacy.
Stolyarchuk is responsible for all investigations at the
prosecutor’s office and stands accused of blocking them, although he denies this.
Alliance between Shokin
and Yanukovych allies
The investigation into the U.S. funds comes amid a large-scale
conflict between Sakvarelidze and Shokin.
Sakvarelidze
says that Shokin, Sevruk and Stolyarchuk have been sabotaging efforts to
prosecute top prosecutors Oleksandr Korniyets and Volodymyr Shapakin on bribery
charges and cleanse the prosecutor’s office of corrupt and incompetent
officials.
Sakvarelidze
argues that Shokin could even be involved in the alleged corruption schemes of
Korniyets and Shapakin, since a copy of Shokin’s passport and his land registration documents
had been found in Korniyets’ house.
The
Prosecutor General’s Office denies the accusations.
On
March 25, Sakvarelidze joined about 150 demonstrators who protested against Shokin’s decision to fire subordinates of the Georgian-born
reformer working on corruption cases against prosecutors, including the
Korniyets-Shapakin case.
Earlier this week the Prosecutor General’s Office published two
letters calling for firing Sakvarelidze and accusing him of populism,
immorality and violating the law.
The letters have been widely ridiculed as harking back to the
obsolete Soviet tradition of issuing public letters against dissidents and the
West.
One of the letters was signed by chief oblast prosecutors,
prompting Shokin’s opponents to question whether top members of the notoriously
corrupt prosecution service have a right to assess Sakvarelidze’s moral
integrity.
The other letter was signed by Verkhovna Rada members from Odesa
Oblast. These include Serhiy Kivalov, an ally of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych
who is accused of rigging the 2004 presidential election; Dmytro Golubev, a
lawmaker from the Petro Poroshenko Bloc who has been investigated by the U.S.
Federal Bureau of Investigations on fraud charges; Vitaly Barvinenko, an
ex-member of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, and Oleksandr Presman, another
ex-Yanukovych ally accused of running a smuggling racket. They all deny the
accusations.
The effective alliance between Shokin’s team and discredited
politicians linked to the Yanukovych regime has triggered a wave of public
indignation.
Odesa Oblast Governor Mikheil Saakashvili argued on March 26
that the letter was revenge on Sakvarelidze for his criminal investigations
against Golubov and his efforts to inspect Kivalov’s tax payments and the
governor’s crackdown on smuggling at the Odesa customs office.
“I don’t understand why
the Prosecutor General’s Office didn’t publish dozens of my requests about
top-level corruption and about Shokin blocking corruption cases,” Leshchenko
wrote on March 26. “But they found room for the letter against Sakvarelidze. The
main thing here is the list of those who signed it. Most of them should
themselves be investigated by the Prosecutor General’s Office.”
The situation became even
more absurd when Korniyets, one of the top prosecutors arrested by
Sakvarelidze, effectively supported Shokin in his conflict with the
reformer. Konniyets said on March 27 he had filed a lawsuit
seeking to cancel Sakvarelidze’s appointment as a deputy prosecutor
general.
Kyiv Post staff writer
Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected]
