The National Agency for Preventing Corruption has failed to complete a single check of incumbent officials’ electronic asset declarations since the declaration system was launched in September.
Meanwhile, all of the employees of the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, and hundreds of prosecutors and judges are refusing to disclose their declarations.
The impunity of top officials appears to be a direct result of political control over law enforcement agencies.
Evidence has emerged in recent weeks that President Petro Poroshenko has massive influence over the National Agency for Preventing Corruption, which is supposed to be independent under the law. Presidential spokesman Yarema Dukh said the administration does not comment on “rumors.”
Apart from failing to punish a single official for lying in declarations, the agency has been accused of launching a political witch hunt against Poroshenko’s opponents.
The anti-graft agency has cited technical reasons for the failure to check declarations.
No declarations checked
The agency has been criticized because it has started checking 91 incumbent officials’ declarations but has not yet completed a single one of the checks.
Rouslan Riaboshapka, a reformist top official of the agency, told the Kyiv Post that the agency was currently completing some of the checks.
Additionally, the agency has checked 3,500 declarations of candidates for officials’ jobs.
Meanwhile, the SBU has refused to give either the anti-corruption agency or the public access to their staff’s asset declarations, citing a state secret, in what critics see as an effort to hide corrupt wealth. This is also seen as a conflict of interest because the SBU’s leadership has made its own wealth a state secret.
In April the declarations of more than 200 prosecutors and judges disappeared from the declaration register. The agency said that the measure was necessary to protect them as officials prosecuting and trying criminal cases.
Sasha Drik, head of the Declarations Under Control watchdog, said that thousands of other declarations could also disappear from the register for the same reason.
One major obstacle to declaration checks is that the agency only has access to 10 out of 14 relevant government agencies’ registers, said Ihor Tkachenko, the agency’s chief of staff.
Presidential influence
In January Natalia Korchak, head of the National Agency for Preventing Corruption, signed an order to transfer some major powers at the agency, including the right to hire and fire employees and set bonuses, to its chief of staff Tkachenko.
Riaboshapka believes the order to be illegal because, under Ukrainian law, independent government agencies cannot be run by their chiefs of staff. Tkachenko denied that the order contradicted the law.
Tkachenko is seen as a tool of presidential influence because he was head of the Presidential Administration’s analytical department in 2015 to 2016. He denies the accusations.
“This is the fruit of the sick imagination of people who don’t want to face up to the fact that they have specific work to do,” Tkachenko said, in an apparent reference to Riaboshapka.
Riaboshapka is seen as independent, while Korchak was initially a protégé of the People’s Front party but later became allied with the Presidential Administration.
Korchak’s deputy, Ruslan Radetzky, was initially seen as close to Poroshenko but has since distanced himself from the Presidential Administration, while another top official at the agency, Oleksandr Skopych, reportedly supports both the Presidential Administration and the People’s Front.
Witch hunt
The agency’s critics argue that Poroshenko is using the anti-corruption agency to attack his political opponents rather than investigate corruption.
In December, the agency initiated an administrative case against reformist lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko, an opponent of Poroshenko, accusing him of violating the anti-corruption law by purchasing a $281,000 apartment.
The Dzerkalo Tyzhnya newspaper reported then, citing a source at the Presidential Administration, that Radetzky had been instructed by the Presidential Administration to file a report on Leshchenko’s alleged administrative infraction. Radetzky, who denied the accusations, has been frequently meeting with Poroshenko’s Deputy Chief of Staff Oleksiy Filatov and other administration officials, the newspaper reported.
The report on Leshchenko’s alleged violations was prepared by Oleksandr Pysarenko, another presidential ally and head of the agency’s department for conflicts of interests and other restrictions set by anti-corruption law.
In 2014 Pisarenko, then acting head of the State Agency for Ecological Investment, found himself at the center of a corruption scandal and was fired after he awarded a Hr 30 million contract to a firm called Intertekhenergo in spite of a competing bid worth Hr 10 million. Intertekhenergo was linked to Yury Ivanyushchenko, a controversial ally of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, and the Svoboda party, according to the Nashi Hroshi investigative project.
In February Kyiv’s Pechersk Court found Leshchenko not guilty.
Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center and a critic of the authorities, has also been targeted. She said in February that the National Agency for Preventing Corruption had threatened to question and prosecute her for paying Hr 9,841 ($366) to Leshchenko for giving lectures on fighting corruption.
Also in February, the agency started an investigation against another Poroshenko opponent, former customs official Yulia Marushevska, over an $18 bonus. The investigation was initiated by Security Service of Ukraine Deputy Chief Pavlo Demchyna, a protégé of Poroshenko’s grey cardinals Ihor Kononenko and Oleksandr Hranovsky.
Meanwhile, in March Poroshenko signed a law introducing the same declaration requirements for anti-corruption activists as for government officials – a measure that has no equivalents in the West and is widely seen as a major attack on civil society.
