Reformer of the week – Tetiana Varvarska
Tetiana Varvarska, a deputy chief of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, is part of a team that has delivered Ukraine’s most important anti-graft breakthroughs to date.
On Aug. 31, the NABU detained a judge in Poltava in a bribery case. However, he started working again on Sept. 4 due to the High Council of Justice’s claims that judges cannot be arrested without its approval.
The council, which has effectively stalled the bureau’s efforts, on Aug. 18 refused to authorize the NABU’s arrest of a judge in Luhansk Oblast on bribery charges.
On Aug. 30, the bureau sent to trial a corruption case against Oleksandr Kolesnyk, an ex-deputy chief prosecutor of Kyiv Oblast.
In July the NABU also arrested Dmytro Sus, an ex-top prosecutor accused of ties to President Petro Poroshenko’s top allies Ihor Kononenko and Oleksandr Hranovsky, on charges of theft and lying in his asset declaration.
According to video recordings of Sus’ conversations, he has said he would raid the Louvre if he were a prosecutor in France and proposed burning a shopping mall. In a recent interview Sus also admitted getting orders from top prosecutors Yury Stolyarchuk and Volodymyr Hutsulyak to close cases and unfreeze assets.
Anti-reformer of the week – Oleksiy Dniprov
The Presidential Administration and the Citizenship Commission, one of whose top officials is Oleksiy Dniprov, and the State Migration Service have refused to give ex-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili documents on the cancellation of his citizenship and to specify the legal grounds for the move, in violation of due process, Saakashvili’s lawyers said on Sept. 4.
Dniprov, the chief of staff for Presidential Administration Head Ihor Rainin and a deputy head of the Citizenship Commission, voted in July to strip Saakashvili of his citizenship. Saakashvili, who is planning to return to Ukraine on Sept. 10, says the decision violates Ukrainian and international law and is politically motivated.
Dniprov, ex-Education Minister Dmytro Tabachnyk’s former deputy and chief of staff, must be fired under the 2014 lustration law on the dismissal of top officials who served ex-President Viktor Yanukovych but Poroshenko has refused to fire him regardless of the law, according to the Justice Ministry.
Dniprov is also under investigation in a theft case against Tabachnyk, who was known for his pro-Russian and pro-Soviet views and has been accused of severely damaging Ukraine’s education system. Under Tabachnyk, Dniprov promoted a controversial plan to centralize the ministry’s control over universities. He also required schools to connect to the Education Ministry’s unified IT system and pay for it through a private firm and obliged Education Ministry employees to be paid through Russia’s Sberbank, prompting corruption accusations.
He did not respond to requests for comment.
Other members of the Citizenship Commission who voted for canceling Saakashvili’s citizenship are also controversial.
One of them, the Interior Ministry’s State Secretary Oleksiy Takhtai, negotiated a corrupt deal in a video with a person who has already been convicted for the deal. The video footage has been recorded by the Security Service of Ukraine and has been recognized by courts as genuine. According to the video, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov is also aware of the deal.
