The National Agency for Preventing Corruption claimed on July 20 it had found no legal violations whatsoever – either administrative or criminal – in the electronic income and asset declarations of 10 ministers that it checked.
By July 20, the agency had completed its first checks of 26 officials’ declarations after dragging its feet on the issue for almost a year since the declaration system was launched in September 2016. The anti-graft agency’s critics accuse it of being a politically subservient tool that is consistently helping officials and politicians escape punishment.
The agency, which did not respond to a request for comment, has previously denied accusations of sabotage.
The ministers checked by the agency include: Defense Minister Stepan Poltorak, Social Policy Minister Andriy Reva, Information Policy Minister Yury Stets, Energy Minister Ihor Nasalik, Culture Minister Yevhen Nyshchuk, Deputy Prime Minister Pavlo Rozenko, Ecology Minister Ostap Semerak, Occupied Territories Minister Vadym Chernysh, Justice Minister Pavlo Petrenko and Infrastructure Minister Volodymyr Omelyan.
The National Agency for Preventing Corruption said, however, that it had found criminally punishable violations in the declarations of Yevhen Samoilenko, an ex-judge of Luhansk Oblast’s Krasny Luch city court, and Ruslan Trebushkin, mayor of the city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk Oblast. The information on these officials was sent to the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office and Donetsk Oblast’s prosecutor’s office.
Veronika Solomko, a rank-and-file police investigator in the city of Kherson, failed to submit her declaration on time, which is an administrative infraction, the agency said.
Apart from these, the anti-graft agency completed checks of Oleksandr Tretyakov, a lawmaker from President Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc; Yury Solod, a lawmaker from the Opposition Bloc, and Presidential Administration official Oleksiy Gorashchenkov, the front-runner in the competition to head the State Investigation Bureau, as well as five judges and five other officials. The agency found no legal violations in their declarations either.
Ruslan Riaboshapka, a top official of the anti-graft agency who quit in June, argued that there had been enough grounds for sending information on several ministers to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau for potential criminal cases. However, the agency lacks both political will and technical ability to do so since it still has no access to some government registers, he added.
“They’re afraid of doing something against the government,” Riaboshapka told the Kyiv Post on July 22.
He argued that the agency was removing most of the compromising information from its decisions on ministers’ declarations, leaving only “minor discrepancies and errors.”
Meanwhile, the State Fiscal Service and the Justice Ministry are refusing to give information to the National Agency for Preventing Corruption, including data on Justice Minister Pavlo Petrenko, Riaboshapka said.
Deputy Justice Minister Sergiy Petukhov said he could not comment, while the State Fiscal Service was not available for comment.
The Civic Lustration Committee said on July 21 that violations had been found in all ministers’ declarations but amendments passed in 2016 effectively exempted them from either criminal or administrative liability for them since the violations fall short of the legal thresholds. Under the amendments, only discrepancies between declared and actual wealth worth at least Hr 168,400 ($6,495) are an administrative infraction and are punishable by a fine, and a discrepancy worth at least Hr 421,000 ($16,236) entails criminal responsibility.
Sasha Drik, head of the Civic Lustration Committee and the Declarations under Control watchdog, told the Kyiv Post on July 22 that the checks had not been implemented property. Moreover, the agency was not empowered to calculate the value of declared assets in cases when officials estimated their property at ridiculously small prices or did not indicate any price at all, which allowed them to lie in their declarations, she said.
The anti-graft agency also failed to check a Radio Liberty investigation according to which Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman lives in his mother-in-law’s high-end Kyiv apartment, which he has failed to declare, Drik said. Groysman denies the accusations of wrongdoing.
In a draft decision on Groysman’s declaration, the agency said that he had failed to declare Hr 80,000 ($3,085) in expenses on his work as speaker of the Verkhovna Rada in 2015 but subsequently the agency made a decision post factum that he had not had to declare it, Drik added.
The agency also said that it had listened to Groysman’s explanations on his declared cash in different currencies worth about $1.5 million in 2015 but did not indicate what these explanations were, according to Drik.
The check into Groysman’s declaration has yet to be officially completed.
Declarations for activists
Meanwhile, several non-governmental organizations and human rights groups have lambasted new amendments on disclosure rules for NGOs proposed by Poroshenko.
The amendments, submitted to parliament on July 10, seek to cancel draconian asset declaration rules for anti-corruption activists adopted in March and introduce new disclosure requirements for NGOs. Under the current rules, anti-corruption activists are required to file electronic asset and income declarations identical to those of government officials, which is widely seen as the authorities’ revenge on civic activists for their efforts to expose graft and introduce electronic declarations for officials.
In a response to a request by the Eidos NGO, the anti-graft agency said in July 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.
Under the new rules proposed by Poroshenko, NGOs with an annual income of at least Hr 480,000 ($18,462) will have to publicly disclose the wages of their top 10 earners, as well as a list of donors who give more than Hr 80,000 ($3,082) and all expenses that exceed Hr 80,000.
Private entrepreneurs have to report funds they receive from foreign donors if they get them directly, as well as expenses financed with such funds if they exceed Hr 4,800 ($185).
The Presidential Administration has portrayed the amendments as a sign of good will 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 pressure 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 a statement on July 13.
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.”
