What do the donors want?
Transparency International
Ukraine has a copy of a policy brief produced by the World Bank
experts upon their visit to Ukraine in July 2014.
The World Bank aimed to
assess Ukraine’s readiness to receive the second tranche from the
bulk of $ 3.5 billion planned to support of reforms.
One of the systemic reforms
that Arseniy Yatseniuk’s government committed to implement was
effective corruption prevention and response. The parties agreed a
list of strategic and institutional changes, which which became new
requirements for Ukraine. This was mostly to do with independent
verification of asset declarations of top officials.
Ukraine pledged “by
2015 to approve legislation aimed at strengthening external
monitoring and verification of integrity of financial reports of
elected state officials and top officials. This legislation would
have to introduce administrative and disciplinary liability for
violation of the rules of declaring financial information or
providing inadequate information.”
It means that the country
has to commence regular independent verifications of asset
declarations of the officials and introduce severe sanctions for
fraud. In this case, the World Bank would be ready to provide
financial support for the government.
The important question is
whether anyone has seen such an independent system of declaration
verification, which is due by the end of 2014. Experts note that
although delegating some powers to tax authorities was a good step,
the controlling powers still rest with the executive. The next step
is to ensure that declarations are verified independently from
executive authorities.
Therefore, this intervention
is aimed at establishment of an independent facility on verification
of declarations. It should be tasked with ensuring the adequacy of
information provided in the declarations and identifying the
discrepancies.
What the World Bank wants to
see is an independent institution capable of verifying the contents
of declarations of officials and – if the need be – of punishing
cheaters.
Where is the bottleneck?
The government has arrived
at a broad consensus on the necessity to establish a centralized and
independent service unit to verify declarations. The Cabinet of
Ministers, the Parliament and Presidential Administration all
understand that overcoming differences and playing as team in this
case is a priority.
But instead the donors are
seeing never-ending disputes of authorities regarding who would be
the main corruption fighter, as opposed to a cohesive plan. These
disputes undermine the anti-corruption drive.
One of the main points of
disagreement is in the scope of functions that the preventive
anti-corruption body, investigative anti-corruption bureau, would
have.
The main debate rotates
around whether to set up a single anti-corruption body with a wide
range of investigative and procedural powers that would also be
responsible for verification of property declarations, or to
establish two anti-corruption agencies: one for prevention of
corruption and the other for prosecution and sanctioning.
There is no simple answer.
Moreover, both modalities have their advantages.
Advantages | Advantages |
It is easier to open | Better integrated protection |
The focus is on repressive | The focus |
Controlled limitation of the | Optimization of the number of |
This is why one should study
international experience, the one that WB experts are focusing on:
“In
Eastern Europe and Baltic states, the property declarations are
commonly verified outside anti-corruption investigative bodies – it
is the case of Romania, Serbia, Lithuania, Croatia, Moldova and
Slovenia.”
Several countries set up
institutions tasked exclusively with verification of property
declarations (for example, Moldova and Romania). This helped to draw
attention to the importance of this mechanism. Countries from other
regions managed to combine the functions of verification of
declarations and anti-corruption investigations under one roof (for
example, Costa-Rica, Peru and Mongolia).
Accordingly, the expert
group emphasizes importance of compromise and account of the country
or regional context. While both modalities are fully implementable,
post-communist countries of the regions usually see a division in
prevention and investigation functions.
In addition, such division
is more reasonable in cases of systemic corruption – in particular,
according to evidence of Group of States against corruption (GRECO).
Ukraine would, in turn, need
a full-fledged system for addressing the conflict of interest in
addition to verification of property declarations, and this would
make such work complicated within the walls of an anti-corruption
investigative body.
It will be difficult for the
institution focused on investigation to strike a balance between
these two issue-tracks.
What does the World Bank
propose?
Firstly, to set up a
specially authorized body to verify the adequacy of asset
declarations of Ukrainian officials.
Secondly, to avoid uniting
the functions of investigation of corruption offenses and financial
property control under one roof.
Thirdly, to provide a body
responsible for monitoring of declarations with sufficient resources
and powers to perform this task.
What shall we do?
Interestingly enough, World
Bank experts deem pre-term parliamentary elections to the main
problem with successful reform.
They note a possible
slowdown in legislative activity due to pre-term elections, whereas
for the independent declaration verification system to function,
respective need to be adopted and signed by October 2014.
Therefore, an urgent search
for consensus on the institutional structure is necessary.
The respective draft law has
been already developed in Ukraine produced jointly by the Ministry of
Justice and civic experts of the “Reanimation Package of
Reforms,” a public initiative. In June they prepared
and discussed the draft law “On Combatting Corruption”.
The draft law has not been
submitted to the parliament yet, although the government had
supported it on Aug. 22.
It is expected that the World Bank
Board of Executive Directors will meet on Dec. 11, 2014 to consider
the loan to Ukraine. It means that Ukraine’s government should
fulfill all commitments, including the commitments on organization of
independent control of declarations, by Oct. 27. This is the day when
the WB is expected to assess Ukraine’s efforts. The very negotiations
on the loan are planned for early November. We don’t have time for
dancing around anti-corruption reforms. It is high time to choose:
either Ukraine has the law and money, or cold radiators and
constituents ready to sack politicians who are neither able to combat
corruption, nor to have houses well heated.
Oleksiy Khmara is the
president of Transparency International Ukraine.
The views expressed in this op-ed represent his personal and do not
necessarily reflect the position of his organization. This op-ed
originally appeared in Ukrainska Pravda and is reprinted with
permission. The English version of the article was produced with
assistance from the UNDP Democratization and Human Rights program.
