Reformer of the week – Kateryna Sikorska
Kateryna Sikorska, an undercover agent of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, is one of the agents who has had her cover blown by the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU.
She had been taking part in an investigation into an alleged large-scale corruption scheme at the State Migration Service.
The NABU on Nov. 30 published conversations in which Dina Pimakhova, the first deputy head of the State Migration Service, discusses taking a $30,000 bribe with another NABU agent.
The NABU said that the SBU and the Prosecutor General’s Office had illegally interfered in the investigation by arresting seven undercover NABU employees involved in the case, including Sikorska. The SBU and prosecutors charged one of them with provoking Primakhova to solicit a bribe, which the bureau denies.
NABU Chief Artem Sytnyk said on Dec. 1 that in this way the country’s leadership, the prosecutor’s office and the SBU had foiled all NABU undercover operations and were trying to destroy the bureau.
He said that the SBU and the Prosecutor General’s Office had illegally published the photos, passports, names, car license plates and addresses of NABU undercover agents.
Sykorska, known as “Agent Kateryna,” also took part in the amber corruption case against Boryslav Rozenblat, an ex-lawmaker of President Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc, and People’s Front lawmaker Maksym Polyakov earlier this year.
Anti-reformer of the week – Kostyantyn Kulik
Top prosecutor Kostyantyn Kulik is leading the criminal case against former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, a major opponent of President Petro Poroshenko.
Saakashvili is accused of getting funding from oligarch Serhiy Kurchenko, an ally of the ousted former President Viktor Yanukovych, to finance protests against the authorities. He denies the charges and believes the case to be a political vendetta by Poroshenko.
The authorities tried to arrest Saakashvili on Dec. 5 but he was subsequently freed by hundreds of his supporters. Saakashvili’s lawyers say the arrest was illegal because the investigators did not give them any arrest or search warrants and did not allow Saakashvili’s lawyers to be present.
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine has charged Kulik, a deputy head of the Prosecutor General’s Office’s department for international legal cooperation, with unlawful enrichment of Hr 2 million ($80,000). Previously Kulik was the chief prosecutor of the war zone.
Kulik has also been lambasted for his ties to the late pro-Russian separatist leader Yevgeny Zhilin and has been accused of financing Zhilin’s thugs, who supported ex-President Viktor Yanukovych during the 2013–2014 EuroMaidan Revolution. Kulik has admitted having previously been friends with Zhilin, but denies any wrongdoing.
In 2015 Kulik and his subordinate Pavlo Yukhymovych were in charge of a criminal case against two Ukrainian soldiers, and the Prosecutor General’s Office sent a request to Russia, the aggressor country, as part of the case, Leonid Maslov, a lawyer who was involved in the case, told the Kyiv Post. Yukhymovych said then that he had no grounds to distrust the Russian government, according to Maslov.
Kulik also led the case that resulted in a Kramatorsk court confiscating $1.5 billion in funds linked to Yanukovych associates in March. But critics have dismissed the confiscation hearings as a political show, as both the investigation and the trial were conducted in secrecy and over just two weeks, and the ruling was not published.
