Who is most at risk of facing arrest or heavy-handed investigations under President Viktor Yanukovych’s rule?
If you believe Yanukovych, anyone who breaks the law should be afraid because he is combating corruption and lawlessness. His team denies persecuting foes and claim many of their own allies are either arrested or under investigation. They have never put names behind these numbers.
Moreover, we don’t see any high-level officials from the president’s team facing investigations for obvious abuses. And those who occupy the highest law enforcement posts – interior minister, security service chief and prosecutor general – are more political hacks than competent professionals.
Instead, we see a couple of common denominators that make people targets of this administration: Allies of ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko are automatically suspect. A person moves up the enemies’ list further if they helped Tymoshenko squeeze out the murky, Swiss-registered RosUkrEnergo from the gas trade while she was prime minister from 2007 to early 2010.
Such is the fate of several former Naftogaz, State Customs or Justice Ministry officials behind bars or under criminal investigation. Some of them, including former Customs Service chief Anatoliy Makarenko and former Naftogaz deputy chief Ihor Didenko, have been in jail since last summer without trial or bail. The “crimes” appear nothing more sinister than carrying out Tymoshenko’s orders to acquire, on behalf of the nation, 11 billion cubic meters of gas from RosUkEnergo.
Tymoshenko said she acquired the gas lawfully as part of the Jan. 19, 2009 accords with Moscow that ended a three-week gas shutoff that left parts of Europe shivering. RosUkrEnergo challenged her claim in a Stockholm court.
After President Viktor Yanukovych’s election, close allies of RosUkrEnergo co-owner and Ukrainian billionaire Dmytro Firtash came to power. They include Energy Minister Yuriy Boyko, presidential chief of staff Serhiy Lyovochkin and Security Service of Ukraine chief Valeriy Khoroshkovsky, whose agency – in violation of elemental conflict-of-interest standards – led the way in investigating the case of the disputed gas.
As Germany’s Der Spiegel reported in an article reprinted by the Kyiv Post on Feb. 4, the Stockholm arbitration case became a farce after the new administration took control of Naftogaz and withdrew the nation’s claim to the disputed gas. The reversal left the court with only one choice: To allow a massive, multi-billion-dollar transfer of wealth from a poor nation to the wealthy private interests behind RosUkrEnergo.
Perhaps the highly volatile conflicts over natural gas explain why Magisters, the prominent Ukrainian law firm, suffered a police raid on Feb. 3 that was carried out with aggression normally reserved for violent criminals or drug dealers. Magisters served as legal counsel to Naftogaz in its legal dispute with RosUkrEnergo until Yanukovych took over.
Perhaps this rationale also explains why Firtash is suing the Kyiv Post. Our newspaper has reported extensively and fairly, we believe, on RosUkrEnergo. We are being sued in London for one of those news stories.
Taken together, these assaults on justice and fair play form a disturbing pattern that is, thankfully, gaining more international attention by the day.
At first, it was hard to fathom why the Yanukovych administration is engaged in such self-destructive attacks against political opponents and free press. But after RosUkrEnergo is factored in, it all starts making more sense.
These guys simply want to stay in power for a long time and, in their world, the best way to ensure their hold is to stamp out all enemies, real and imagined – hence, the scorched-earth strategy. They don’t like people with long memories and who know what they’ve done. They probably don’t realize it yet, but their arrogance will be their undoing.
Editor’s Note:
Independent observers have noted a decline in democracy during President Viktor Yanukovych’s one year in power. Pressure is being brought to bear on media outlets, including the Kyiv Post, which faces a libel lawsuit in London by Dmytro Firtash, the billionaire co-owner of RosUkrEnergo with close ties to Yanukovych’s inner circle.
The story in question was published July 2 and involved straightforward reporting about alleged corruption and conflict of interest in the gas trade. We have offered to correct factual inaccuracies and have invited Firtash’s comments, but he has chosen litigation.
This indicates to us that his aim is to silence the Kyiv Post as one of Ukraine’s oldest and most respected sources of independent journalism. Since Dec. 14, the newspaper has blocked Internet traffic from the U.K. in support of proposals to improve free-speech protections of English libel law.
More information can be found at http://www.libelreform.org/ and more information about the Firtash lawsuit and the story in question can be found here .
