Beginning in January, anti-corruption activists are starting to file annual asset declarations identical to those of government officials.
Starting in March, anti-corruption activists also had to file statements on substantial changes in their assets.
The requirement on annual declarations for activists was passed into law in March 2017 and came into force on Jan. 1, 2018. Their declarations have to be filed before April 1 of this year.
Critics of the government who are subject to the asset declarations have accused the government of using the new regulation to take revenge on civil society. Ukrainian civil society helped push for government officials to file detailed asset declarations in 2016, exposing many politicians and top civil servant’s extravagant wealth.
Anti-corruption activists subject to the new declarations have criticized the change as a way in which they could be discredited, and potential grounds for fabricating administrative and criminal cases against them.
“Their main goal is to make sure that we are busy with court hearings and interrogations at the National Agency for Preventing Corruption (NAPC) and to discredit us before the (2019) parliamentary elections,” Oleksandr Lemenov, an anti-corruption expert at the Reanimation Package of Reforms, told the Kyiv Post.
There are no equivalents of such declarations for activists in the West. Western governments backing Ukraine have lambasted the measure and demanded that Ukrainian authorities repeal it.
President Petro Poroshenko has promised to cancel the draconian disclosure requirements for activists but failed to do so.
In July, the NAPC, which is supposed to check asset declarations, said that any individuals who get funds or provide services as part of anti-corruption programs must file electronic declarations identical to those of government officials.
New disclosure rules
In July, Poroshenko submitted a bill to cancel the asset declaration rules for anti-corruption activists and introduce new disclosure requirements for NGOs. But the old rules have not been canceled, and the new rules have not yet been passed.
The Presidential Administration portrayed the new rules as a sign of goodwill towards civil society and claimed they were in line with Western standards.
However, the new rules have been criticized by Freedom House, the Anti-Corruption Action Center, the Reanimation Package of Reforms, the Declarations Under Control watchdog, the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, the Kharkiv Human Rights Group, and Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman Valeria Lutkovska. They argue that the new amendments are yet another effort by the authorities to obstruct NGOs’ anti-corruption activities, and to put pressure on them.
“These requirements put additional pressure on NGOs and individual entrepreneurs and are discriminatory: they are not applied to other persons of public or private law,” Lutkovska, the Ukrainian Helsinki Group and the Kharkiv Human Rights Group said in July.
The requirements set severe penalties, including stripping NGOs of non-profit status and imposing fines, and violate international law and the law on the protection of personal data, the groups argued.
“It’s especially appalling that penalties are imposed by an interested party, the State Fiscal Service, without a court decision,” they said. “…We believe that these requirements violate international standards on the freedom of assembly and are discriminatory.”
NAPC scandals
Meanwhile, Sasha Drik, head of the Declarations Under Control civic watchdog, wrote on Jan. 4 that the NAPC had issued a document that would allow it to block the National Anti-Corruption Bureau’s criminal cases into government officials’ electronic asset declarations. She published a copy of the document, which was issued in December.
According to the document, the NAPC believes that the NABU can only open cases into asset declarations with the NAPC’s approval, citing European standards.
The NAPC has so far failed to find any criminal or administrative offenses in any of the top officials’ declarations.
Hanna Solomatina and Oksana Divnich, top officials of the NAPC, said in November that the agency is involved in large-scale corruption and completely controlled by the Presidential Administration. The NAPC and the Presidential Administration denied the accusations.
Solomatina published what she says is her correspondence with Oleksiy Horashchenkov, a Presidential Administration official, in which he is trying to give her orders. The Kyiv Post has also obtained the documents of an audit on which the corruption investigation is based.
The NAPC corruption case on Nov. 28 was transferred on the orders of Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky and Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko from the independent NABU to the presidentially controlled SBU, in what critics, including Solomatina, believe to be an effort to destroy the case.
In December, Solomatina said that the NAPC’s leadership was pressuring, punishing and firing whistleblowers, while a competition commission, one of whose members is Horashchenkov, is choosing the new top NAPC officials.
She also said that the SBU was not investigating the NAPC corruption case at all, claiming that it is not authorized to do so.
The SBU did not respond to a request for comment.
