The result came in the form of a 176-page report dated October 14.
Tymoshenko has been inconvenienced and inhibited in carrying out her work with persistent questioning by investigators in her country and by a travel abroad restriction. These facts would suggest that the subject report is damaging to Tymoshenko.
Still, there has been no arrest or indictment and even the travel restriction has just been lifted.
Even more puzzling is that the report has not evoked any serious analysis or given much weight anywhere. The report commends the investigators on their work and the Yanukovych people appear to flaunt it.
The Tymoshenko people have decried it as biased. But the fact that there has not been any serious debate on its content to date, five months later, appears to speak louder than the report. A question that has to be asked is why was the new Cabinet of Ministers or, specifically, the Ministry of Finance conducting an investigation into alleged criminality. TROUT, AKIN and KROLL were merely following their client’s instructions, intent on manifesting due diligence and, perhaps, at the very least providing some material for future proceedings to justify their retainer.
Lending their names to the investigation does not change the fact that the investigation was being conducted by a successor administration in Ukraine, out to indict its predecessor and chief political rival. Engaging the prosecutor general or even better, an independent prosecutor would have lent at least the appearance of propriety and objectivity. In any event, an independent analysis of the report leaves Tymoshenko unscathed.
Sure there were insinuations that government money was not well spent, that products purchased with government funds were not utilized as well as they should have been. The bottom line is that no criminal activity in the nature of corruption or self-aggrandizement was even implied.
Perhaps, the best known findings refer to the sale of Kyoto Protocol carbon credits to the Japanese and using that money to support the Pension Fund. Disingenuously, the 20- page portion of the report asserts the impropriety of this type of transaction and then in a mere one line footnote acknowledges that the use of carbon credit sale proceeds for other purposes is not prohibited by the Kyoto Protocol.
There is no allegation that any of the Japanese money was misused for personal gain. On the subject of the purchase by the Ministry of Health of medical supplies/vehicles on credit, the allegedly damning allegations are the cost of the credit which would burden future Ukrainian governments and that some of the vehicles were fitted with “The program of the Government of Yulia Tymoshenko” stickers which were visible during the 2010 presidential election campaign. There is no allegation that the cost of credit even if high, exceeded normal rates. Further there are no findings as to the cost of the stickers or that the public paid for them.
Then there is the subject of purchasing sugar abroad to replenish reserves at an exorbitant price. An interesting detail is that the actual payments were made in March 2010 after Yanukovych had been sworn in. An example of the incongruities within the subject report are the allegations of misuse of Stabilization Fund money to finance a land privatization registration program by the Tymoshenko cabinet.
The report refers to a decree for the registration of some six thousand such transactions at a cost of almost Hr 6 billion and then accuses the Tymoshenko government of only registering some 10 percent of that amount and using the Stabilization Fund to finance same without the approval of two parliamentary committees.
The report mentions but fails to connect a subsequent decree which decreased the initial proposed outlay by more that 90 percent. That clearly explains why only 10 percent was registered.
The misuse insinuated by the Stabilization Fund source of funding is specious since the report fails to quote from any Stabilization Fund terms of reference which may have precluded the use of such funds for the registration of land privatization. In the end putting in order land ownership records can certainly be considered an economic stabilizer. Public money not spent frugally is the thrust of the subject report.
Inasmuch as TROUT, AKIN and KROLL themselves bill at a premium, this costly adventure was another example of money not well spent. That’s ironic. More importantly, this is a glaring case of a government using public funds to go after its main political opposition, also known as using public funds for personal-political gain. Now, that may be criminal.
Askold S. Lozynskyj is a New York City attorney and immediate past president of the Ukrainian World Congress.
