Reformer of the week – Dmytro Bulakh
Dmytro Bulakh, head of the Kharkiv Anti-Corruption Center, was severely beaten on Aug. 30.
Bulakh, an opposition member of Kharkiv Oblast’s legislature, was assaulted by two unknown people, hit on the head and kicked, and his ribs were broken. Photos of Bulakh, with a bloodied head, have been published.
The government’s critics see the assault as part of a wholesale crackdown on anti-corruption activists and the opposition by the authorities, which they deny.
Kyiv police on Aug. 16 charged anti-graft activist Vitaly Shabunin with assaulting a video blogger in what he sees as a political vendetta. In July President Petro Poroshenko stripped his major political opponent Mikheil Saakashvili of citizenship and made him stateless.
Bulakh, previously an activist of the EuroMaidan Revolution, has exposed corruption schemes in Kharkiv and is a staunch critic of Kharkiv Mayor Gennady Kernes and ex-Kharkiv Oblast Governor Mykhailo Dobkin.
In July Dobkin was charged in a corruption case. Kernes, who is also being investigated in graft cases, has been charged with kidnapping, torturing and threatening to murder EuroMaidan activists. The kidnapping case was sent to court in March 2015 but he is not even under arrest, and the trial has seen no progress.
Anti-reformer of the week – Oleksandr Seryogin
Oleksandr Seryogin, a newly-appointed top official of the National Agency for Preventing Corruption, on Aug. 21 blocked the consideration of the asset declaration of Kyiv National University Rector Leonid Hubersky.
In July the Novoye Vremya magazine published a story on Hubersky’s undeclared wealth. Iryna Mostova, a deputy head of the agency’s conflicts of interest department, Vitaly Svitlyk, a member of the agency’s oversight council, and Ruslan Riaboshapka, an ex-top official of the agency, argued that Seryogin had a conflict of interest because he had worked under Hubersky. However, the agency’s leadership ignored this argument.
Seryogin, reportedly a protege of President Petro Poroshenko, was appointed on Aug. 18 and replaced Rouslan Radetzky, who had resigned as a top official of the agency as it is becoming increasingly discredited and is failing to carry out its functions.
In June Ruslan Riaboshapka, another top official of the anti-graft agency, also quit, arguing that the agency was dysfunctional and calling for its leadership to be replaced.
The agency, which is headed by government loyalists, said on Aug. 21 that it had found no violations in President Petro Poroshenko’s asset declarations, paying no attention to his undeclared Spanish villa, and completed checking them without even discussing the issue.
Parliament’s anti-corruption committee has stated that Poroshenko was required to declare the villa since it is in his personal use.
The agency has completed checks of officials’ 60 asset declarations and found punishable violations only in several minor officials’ declarations, including the mayor of a small city, claiming that not a single minister or top official had violated the law.
Meanwhile, Deputy Justice Minister Nataly Sevostianova, who has triggered controversies by declaring $358,000 in different currencies in cash and two luxury cars worth about $77,000, is reportedly being considered as a replacement for the current collective leadership of the anti-graft agency.
Sevostianova, who helped Poroshenko get rid of his political opponent Mikheil Saakashvili by voting to strip him of citizenship at the Citizenship Commission in July, has also helped a top tax official escape the 2014 lustration law on the dismissal of officials who served ex-President Viktor Yanukovych.
