Reformer of the week: Maxim Hryshchuk
Maxim Hryshchuk, deputy chief anti-corruption prosecutor, has led a strong campaign with his colleagues since he got the job in December 2015.
Hryshchuk has been praised as one of the few prosecutors who served as a fighter on the war front in 2014-2015. He came into the limelight as a “cyborg” who fought Russian-separatist troops at Donetsk Airport.
The most recent evidence of the effectiveness of his office’s work came on Aug. 31, when a Kyiv court issued an arrest warrant for an official of railway monopoly Ukrzalyznytsia, who was charged by anti-corruption prosecutors with embezzling Hr. 13.65 million.
Anti-corruption prosecutors and employees of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine also arrested the acting rector of the National Aviation University on Aug. 26, accusing him of taking a Hr. 3 million bribe.
The anti-graft bureau and the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office are also investigating criminal cases against top allies of President Petro Poroshenko and ex-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, including Poroshenko’s grey cardinals Ihor Kononenko and Oleksandr Hranovsky.
The new anti-graft bodies have come under attack in recent weeks in what Poroshenko’s critics see as his attempt to limit their independence, and ultimately emasculate them. In August, employees of the anti-corruption bureau said they had been tortured by prosecutors linked to Hranovsky, although those prosecutors denied that.
Anti-reformer of the week: Oleh Valendyuk
Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko on Sept. 5 appointed Oleh Valendyuk as the first deputy chief of the prosecutor’s office of Crimea – a Kyiv-based body focused on violations committed by the Russian occupation authorities in the annexed Ukrainian peninsula.
But Tetiana Kozachenko, the head of the Justice Ministry’s lustration department, believes Lutsenko had no right to appoint Valendyuk, who is subject to dismissal under the lustration law on firing top officials who served under ex-President Viktor Yanukovych.
Valendyuk has been lambasted for being in charge of criminal cases against EuroMaidan protesters. On the eve of the murder of dozens of demonstrators in central Kyiv on Feb. 20, 2014, Yanukovych’s prosecutor general, Viktor Pshonka, gave him a bonus for taking “an active role” in cracking down on protesters.
Valendyuk is an ally of Oleksandr Hranovsky, a controversial grey cardinal of President Petro Poroshenko accused of corruption and illegally interfering with law enforcement. Hranovsky denies the corruption accusations, but has admitted being acquainted with Valendyuk.
Lutsenko has been accused of deceiving the public by first seemingly complying with the lustration law and ousting Valendyuk as Kyiv’s acting prosecutor in July, and then clandestinely giving him another job.
Lutsenko performed a similar trick when he asked Roman Hovda, a controversial ally of ex-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, to step down as a deputy prosecutor general in May, but then secretly appointed him chief prosecutor of Kyiv in July.
