Pavlo Vovk, head of the Kyiv Administrative District Court, is in many ways the symbol of Ukraine’s corrupt and lawless law enforcement.
Despite massive evidence of corruption and other crimes, Vovk has stayed in his job and escaped trial due to his shady and corrupt links to powerful politicians. He denies all accusations of wrongdoing.
The case against Vovk started in 2019 and has been blocked under three consecutive prosecutors general — Yuriy Lutsenko, Ruslan Riaboshapka and Iryna Venediktova.
Moreover, the judiciary’s top regulating agency, the High Council of Justice, also came to the rescue. They refused to suspend Vovk in 2019, and are now accusing investigators of threatening Vovk’s non-existent “independence” as a judge. Needless to say, the council’s members are implicated in the Vovk case.
On July 17, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and Deputy Prosecutor General Andriy Lyubovych resurrected the case and charged Vovk and other judges with organized crime, usurpation of power, bribery and unlawful interference with government officials.
In keeping with the tradition, now it appears that accused judges are being protected by the Prosecutor General Venediktova, who is refusing to apply for their suspension.
The Ukrainian media published NABU’s recordings of conversations of Vovk and other judges. The content of the tapes can shock even those who know how corrupt Ukrainian courts are.
The Kyiv Administrative District Court has issued some of the most controversial rulings of the recent years. Its rulings benefitted tobacco industry and Ukrainian oligarchs. It tried to cancel the nationalization of PrivatBank and ruled that head of NABU Artem Sytnyk interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Now, after hearing the judges talk on the tapes, we know that these critical rulings were made by people who are as far from justice as one can imagine.
The Vovk tapes demonstrate a large-scale system of corruption involving the High Council of Justice, the High Qualification Commission, the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, the National Agency for Preventing Corruption and the State Investigation Bureau.
One of the reasons why the entire law enforcement system has blocked the case against Vovk is that many powerful people are implicated in the Vovk case, which clearly reveals political interference in the judiciary. These people include Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, ex-President Petro Poroshenko and his top allies Ihor Kononenko and Oleksandr Hranovsky, as well as Serhiy Kivalov, a powerful ally of former President Viktor Yanukovych. According to four Kyiv Post sources who were not authorized to speak to the press, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s former chief of staff, Andriy Bohdan, is also mentioned in the Vovk tapes.
The case also shows the Ukrainian authorities’ utter failure to reform the country’s judiciary and prosecution service for decades.
If successfully prosecuted, the Vovk case may blow up Ukraine’s entire system of kleptocracy and end the careers of many top politicians. This is exactly why the case needs to go forward — and also why it is likely to be buried by the authorities.
