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The Verkhovna Rada on March 16 failed to appoint an auditor of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) who is allegedly loyal to President Petro Poroshenko and his gray cardinals Ihor Kononenko and Oleksandr Hranovsky.
The appointment of the auditor, Nigel Brown, is seen as an effort by Poroshenko and his allies to restrict the bureau’s independence and potentially fire its chief, Artem Sytnyk. The bureau’s chief can be dismissed as a result of an audit.
Three NABU auditors are appointed by the president, the Cabinet of ministers and the Verkhovna Rada. If parliament chooses Brown, all three auditors will be controlled by Poroshenko.
The alleged efforts to restrict the anti-corruption bureau’s independence come as it is prosecuting State Fiscal Service Chief Roman Nasirov, a Poroshenko protégé.
In December, parliament’s anti-corruption committee unanimously approved as the bureau’s auditor Rob Storch – a deputy inspector general of the United States, who is seen as independent from the Ukrainian authorities. But the Poroshenko Bloc, the People’s Front, as well as the Opposition Bloc and Vidrodzhennya, two offshots of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, have subsequently tried to cancel this decision and approve Brown instead. Vidrodzhennya is linked to tycoon Ihor Kolomoisky.
The Poroshenko Bloc and the People’s Front have allegedly resorted to numerous procedural violations to push for Brown’s candidacy, although they deny this.
The anti-corruption committee on March 15 failed to make a decision, and a third of the committee’s members asked its chairman Yegor Sobolev to assemble it again. Sobolev scheduled a committee meeting for March 17.
However, lawmakers from the Poroshenko Bloc and the People’s Front did not wait for March 17 and held a meeting on March 16 without Sobolev, approving a decision to recommend both Brown and Storch to parliament.
Sobolev, as well as Sergii Leshchenko, a member of the committee and a reformist lawmaker, and Vitaly Shabunin, the head of the Anti-Corruption Action’s executive board, say that the March 16 meeting was illegal because members of the committee had not been notified of the meeting within 24 hours, and the chairman did not refuse to hold a meeting.
The Poroshenko Bloc and the People’s Front argue that the meeting was legal.
One of those voting for the decision, Serhiy Dunayev from the Opposition Bloc, has been accused of having links to Kremlin-backed separatists, which he denies. Former separatist leader Sergei Korsunsky testified last year that Dunayev, the ex-mayor of Lysychansk and a former member of the Party of Regions, had helped militants who seized the Security Service of Ukraine’s headquarters in Luhansk in 2014.
Ex-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili claimed on March 16 that the Opposition Bloc had agreed to vote for Brown in exchange for the Kyiv Court of Appeals’ decision on the same day to cancel a notice of suspicion for Oleksandr Yefremov, the former head of the Party of Regions’ parliamentary faction, in a treason case.
Meanwhile, Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, head of Transparency International Ukraine, argued that the Opposition Bloc could have voted for Brown in exchange for a recent plea bargain between Oleksandr Katsuba, a former Yanukovych ally charged in a graft case, with the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Another committee member who voted for Brown, Tetiana Rychkova, is a well-known volunteer helping the Ukrainian military. She has been criticized by Poroshenko’s opponents for what they see as a blow to her reputation as a result of the vote.
Efforts to push for Brown’s candidacy will likely continue on March 17, when another committee meeting will be held.
In an effort to create a pro-Poroshenko majority on the committee and appoint Brown, the Verkhovna Rada on March 14 delegated two new committee members from the Poroshenko Bloc, Tetiana Rychkova and Andriy Nemirovsky, as well as Yuriy Buhlak, who was formerly a legal advisor to the president’s Roshen confectionary.
Previously lawmakers of the Poroshenko Bloc were also accused of trying to disrupt and discredit the anti-corruption committee by not attending its meetings.
The United States, British and Canadian embassies in Ukraine and the European Union’s delegation to Ukraine have indirectly criticized the efforts to impose Brown’s candidacy and called for an independent auditor for the bureau.
Brown is a little-known and controversial British citizen.
His candidacy emerged out of nowhere, Leshchenko and the Anti-Corruption Action Center say.
British authorities have investigated Brown on suspicion of bribing a police officer on behalf of a Russian client and buying secret police information.
His company has also provided security services to Russian exiled oligarchs Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky, and received 6 million British pounds from Russian nationals’ offshore firms, according to UK newspaper The Times and Radio Liberty.
Brown, who has already criticized the anti-graft bureau, refused to answer journalists’ questions about his candidacy at the March 15 meeting of the anti-corruption committee.
