Billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, whom I referred to in an earlier op-ed as “the No. 1 enemy of state,” has a new target. His whole arsenal is now engaged in a personal attack against the only truly independent law enforcement agency that has existed in Ukraine since independence — the National Anti-Corruption Bureau.
Kolomoisky’s goal is a big one — he seeks to behead the agency and undermine its work. The reason is simple: Among the law enforcement agencies, it’s NABU that is causing the oligarch most problems. The NABU is investigating cases involving the activities of Kolomoisky and his associates.
The oligarch and the agency go back a long way.
Several years ago, when NABU was created, one of the first cases it took up was an investigation of abuse of office by the officials of the State Aviation Service which benefitted Kolomoisky’s carrier, Ukraine International Airlines. They were accused of embezzling Hr 150 million in service fees which the airline collected from passengers but didn’t transfer to the state budget. As a result of interference, the case fell apart. The NABU blamed Nazar Kholodnytsky, Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor and deputy of then-Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko.
Now NABU is investigating two cases that directly concern Kolomoisky. They are investigations of embezzlement in PrivatBank and in Ukrnafta, an oil company where the state owns the majority stake, which didn’t stop Kolomoisky from milking it for years.
And both of the investigations are in their final stages.
Read also: Ukraine’s top anti-corruption official under fire from targets of his investigations
The case of PrivatBank was transferred to NABU by then-Prosecutor General Ruslan Riaboshapka in 2019. Kolomoisky’s associates in parliament fired Riaboshapka in early March after nearly six months of lobbying to get rid of him. Riaboshapka remained silent until last week, when he said that the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, has been blocking a key expert analysis in the case of PrivatBank, investigated by the NABU. By doing this, they are saving the organizers of a multi-billion dollar embezzlement scheme from facing official charges.
Riaboshapka also pointed out that there is a risk that the case of PrivatBank will be transferred from the NABU to the SBU, The service, the successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB, remains an unreformed agency, not seen as independent or neutral, and the PrivatBank case can easily be ended there.
The case of Ukrnafta looks into several instances of suspected abuse at the state-owned company that benefitted Kolomoisky. One of them concerns Ukrnafta selling oil to 100 companies associated with Kolomoisky through fictitious auctions in 2015. Another one concerns the embezzlement of Hr 2.5 billion from Ukrnafta by a company Kotlas, also associated with the oligarch. The NABU prepared charges against 10 people, including Kolomoisky’s associate Oleksiy Kushch, once the acting head of Ukrnafta. However, Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Kholodnytsky hasn’t been hurrying to authorize the charges.
With those investigations approaching their finale, it is easy to understand why the lawmakers associated with Kolomoisky have been attacking the NABU so restlessly.
The oligarch’s first and foremost goal is to behead the NABU by firing Artem Sytnyk, the chief of the bureau. The idea is that it will paralyze the work of the agency. Without the leader, a regular detective investigating a case stands alone against the powerful people backed by billions of dollars, TV channels, and lawmakers. And there is no certainty that the newly-appointed head of the agency won’t be a corrupt person who will be blocking the cases targeting Kolomoisky and others like him.
A coalition of lawmakers who are trying to get rid of Sytnyk includes lawmakers controlled by Kolomoisky, and the factions of pro-Russian Opposition Platform For Life, Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna, and Petro Poroshenko’s European Solidarity. All of them have reasons to dislike Sytnyk, because the NABU investigates cases targeting representatives of each of these forces.
To get rid of Sytnyk, lawmakers drafted a bill that would simplify his firing. The bill eliminates a condition that the head of NABU can be fired by the parliament only following the audit that finds his work unsatisfactory. To slow down this plan, the Voice faction and the liberal part of the Servant of the People faction, who support Sytnyk, filed 13 alternative bills.
But on April 28, the parliament’s law enforcement committee endorsed the bill that simplifies the firing of the head of NABU. It’s a wonder how a fight against an anti-corruption institution can bring together ideological opponents. Even the lawmakers who usually miss the committee’s meetings showed up this time — and left after the committee was done with the bill on firing Sytnyk.
Kolomoisky’s second goal, which he tries to achieve with the help of his minions in parliament, is to shut down the NABU in its current form and make it a department within the State Investigation Bureau.
Kolomoisky’s new concept that his associates are popularizing on TV channels, on social media, and even in the Servant of the People’s party chat, is the following: NABU costs Ukraine’s budget billions of hryvnia a year but since the beginning of 2020, it only brought in Hr 14,000 in confiscations within corruption cases.
Everything in this statement — from the first word to the last one — is either a lie or a manipulation.
First of all, NABU’s yearly budget is much smaller than that of other law enforcement agencies. And it recently was cut even further, when Verkhovna Rada changed the state budget to reassign funds due to the COVID-19 pandemic. NABU’s 2020 budget lost Hr 114 million. The budget of the Interior Ministry, on the contrary, was increased by Hr 195 million, helping it reach Hr 93 billion — meaning that the Interior Ministry costs the state 93 times more than NABU.
But of course — what is permissible for the “temporary” Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, isn’t permissible for Sytnyk.
Secondly, the statement that “NABU brings too little money to the budget and therefore should be eliminated” is a manipulation. A law enforcement agency isn’t a business and doesn’t have to be self-sustainable. In the same way, one may say that Ukraine’s health care system should be eliminated because more people die than get born — therefore, it is ineffective. Or that our education facilities should shut down because many people emigrate anyway. Or that we shouldn’t spend money on environmental projects because we will all die anyway. And so on.
Third, the Hr 14,000 that were confiscated in 2020 have nothing to do with NABU. The amount of funds reimbursed to the state through the NABU investigations is Hr 601 million. These are funds that have been voluntarily repaid by those involved in NABU cases at the pre-trial stage. One recent example: lawmakers of the previous convocation of parliament repaid the money they illegally received as accommodation compensation.
Moreover, a total of Hr 10 billion can be returned to the state budget through confiscation in cases that have already been brought to court by NABU. These Hr 10 billion don’t include the case of PrivatBank because no one was yet charged within it — as a consequence of sabotage on the part of the SBU. But those Hr 10 billion come from other high-profile cases — such as the cases of ex-lawmakers Mykola Martynenko, Oleksandr Onishchenko, and Maksym Mykytas, ex-Head of Fiscal Service Roman Nasirov, an energy pricing scheme known as “Rotterdam Plus,” and so on.
The launch of NABU meant that no one was untouchable anymore. People who have been milking state enterprises and using the stolen money to buy real estate in Austria or a political party in Ukraine — those people faced criminal charges, for the first time in Ukraine’s history. That is why NABU has had to fight for its existence against vengeful politicians from its first days.
Altogether, NABU and Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office have charged some 500 people who are accused of inflicting Hr 11 billion in losses to the state. Some of them fled the country. Among them are ex-lawmaker Onishchenko and ex-head of Energy Commission Dmytro Vovk, who signed off the “Rotterdam Plus” scheme.
When speaking about money, one shouldn’t also forget about the bail money that was seized after defendants violated their bail conditions.
Mykytas, a developer and a former member of parliament, has to pay the state Hr 80 million, and the so-called “Smuggling King” Vadym Alperin – Hr 35 million. It became possible due to the emergence of the Anti-Corruption Court and the change of the administration. In the times of Poroshenko, when NABU cases were heard by corrupt local courts, a court refused to seize Hr 100 million from Nasirov for violating his bail.
In general, NABU does only part of the work, but it’s the most important part — it conducts investigations and collects evidence. And it is precisely this that is most feared by corrupt officials: NABU does not let the evidence of their illegal activity disappear into oblivion. And the punishment — confiscation — is the responsibility of the court.
This war against NABU has been on since the first day of the bureau’s existence. It’s the price that they pay for their independence and the ruination of the status quo, which envisioned law enforcement agencies only going for opposition politicians, and only following an order coming from the presidential administration.
This pressure will be intensifying as NABU comes closer to Kolomoisky. And all of us — not only Ukrainian democratic politicians but also representatives of the partner countries that invested time and money into helping build the anti-corruption infrastructure in Ukraine — must protect NABU from political reprisal.
Sergii Leshchenko is a Kyiv Post columnist, investigative journalist and former member of the Verkhovna Rada.
