Last week the Verkhovna Rada passed a Nayyem-sponsored bill that enables the National Police to wiretap suspects, boosting its independence from prosecutors and security officials.
Nayyem is also helping the Interior Ministry replace the corrupt Soviet-era traffic police with
Western-style police highway patrols nationwide, most recently in Mariupol and Severodonetsk.
Nayyem, a former investigative journalist, has also consistently pushed for anti-corruption efforts.
Specifically, he has called for the setting up of a parliamentary commission to investigate the offshore schemes of President Petro Poroshenko and other politicians. However, the Verkhovna Rada has rejected the proposals.
Anti-reformer of the week: Mykhailo Apostol
Several civil society groups said on June 6 that Mykhailo Apostol, an adviser to Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, is blocking efforts to cleanse the police of corrupt officials.
The organizations said they were withdrawing from police vetting commissions due to sabotage by the Interior Ministry. They said Avakov, Apostol and other top ministry officials, including Volodymyr Fylenko and Ihor Klymenko, have taken over the vetting commissions, while civil society has lost control over them. In Zhytomyr Oblast, a vetting commission member chosen by Avakov and his aides has the same full name and birth date as that of a mafia boss cited in a criminal dossier published by the Ukrainska Pravda news site in 2006, journalist Olga Khudetska wrote on June 9.
According to alleged Party of Regions accounting spreadsheets published by Ukrainska Pravda in May, a person referred to in the spreadsheets as Apostol received a $1.4 million bribe from ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions in 2012. Mykhailo Apostol, who was a member of the Batkyvshchyna Party at the time, denies getting the bribe.
