Reformer of the week – Viktor Trepak
Prosecutor General Ruslan Riaboshapka on Oct. 8 appointed Viktor Trepak, a reformist security official, as one of his deputies.
Trepak was a deputy head of the Security Service of Ukraine and head of its anti-corruption unit in 2015 to 2016.
In 2015 Trepak was one of the officials behind the arrest of top prosecutors Oleksandr Korniyets and Volodymyr Shapakin on bribery charges. He resigned after saying he could no longer work because then-Prosecutor Viktor Shokin, a loyalist of ex-President Petro Poroshenko, was blocking the bribery case.
“When I became head of the anti-corruption department, I gave a clear signal: the Security Service of Ukraine will end all shadowy, corrupt and other dubious schemes,” he told the Kyiv Post in 2016. “But then I first heard that very influential people were unhappy with me. Subsequently, this played a role in my fate.”
He also said that “the case of the diamond prosecutors is a landmark one, because it revealed a hydra of corruption at the highest level of the law enforcement system, with links to the political leadership.”
In 2016 Trepak also submitted the alleged “black ledger” of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine. The alleged corrupt payments documented in the ledger are worth about $2 billion.
Among the people that the party made alleged off-the-books payments to was Paul Manafort, then-chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Meanwhile, Riaboshapka has fired all controversial deputy prosecutor generals. These include Serhiy Kiz, who was accused of blocking investigations into the 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution.
However, Riaboshapka has not yet appointed any trustworthy officials to oversee EuroMaidan cases, and Kiz proteges, including Maksym Ryabenko and Viktor Mysyak, are still in charge of them. Investigators and lawyers warn that the EuroMaidan investigations may collapse.
Anti-reformer of the week – Denys Monastyrsky
Denys Monastyrsky, a lawmaker from President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People party and head of the Verkhovna Rada’s law enforcement and judiciary committee, has blocked several key anti-corruption measures. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Thanks to Monastyrsky’s legislative amendments, the Verkhovna Rada on Oct. 4 failed to remove major obstacles for criminal investigations and to fully eliminate lawmakers’ immunity from prosecution.
On Sept. 3 the parliament lifted lawmakers’ immunity from prosecution. However, on Oct. 4 the Rada undermined this breakthrough when it failed to pass a procedural law amendment allowing law enforcement agencies to wiretap and search lawmakers without the Verkhovna Rada’s approval.
The Verkhovna Rada also failed to cancel an important norm of the 2017 procedural law that dramatically hampered investigations by limiting them to 18 months before a notice of suspicion is filed. If an investigation doesn’t result in a notice of suspicion in 18 months, it has to be shut down.
The Anti-Corruption Action Center said that it was very hard to carry out investigations and receive international assistance within such terms.
“This restriction makes top-level corruption investigations almost impossible,” said Vitaly Shabunin, head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center’s executive board.
Moreover, parliament did not abolish the 2017 norm that blocks investigations by allowing courts to cancel notices of suspicion. The norms were part of the 2017 amendments initiated by then-Radical Party lawmaker Andriy Lozovy.
