The Cabinet of Ministers on May 26 appointed legal scholar Mykhailo Buromensky as an auditor of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU).
Critics argue that the surprise appointment took place in a shady and non-transparent way in a late-night Cabinet meeting on Friday, when most of the public did not follow the news, to lessen the public outcry. They also say that foreign candidates for an auditor’s job had been warned about interviews on a very short notice, and that Cabinet representatives took issue with their lack of Ukrainian language skills and of time they were willing to spend in Ukraine.
The three NABU auditors are appointed by the president, the Cabinet of Ministers and the Verkhovna Rada.
Since the leadership of the NABU can be fired as a result of an audit, President Petro Poroshenko has been accused of trying to impose loyal auditors in order to control the bureau.
These efforts are part of a long-running conflict between Poroshenko and the NABU, which has prosecuted presidential allies like State Fiscal Service Chief Roman Nasirov.
Buromensky is the president of the Institute for Applied Humanities Research and head of the international law department of the Yaroslav the Wise Legal Academy.
He was appointed by Poroshenko as a delegate to the Group of States Against Corruption or GRECO in 2016 and is allegedly loyal to the Presidential Administration. Buromensky has also worked with Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman at Poroshenko’s Constitutional Commission and at Groysman’s working group on decentralization.
Buromensky’s Institute for Applied Humanities Research closely cooperates with government agencies, including the Supreme Court, the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Justice Ministry, and conducts research commissioned by government agencies.
His candidacy was also pushed by the People’s Front party, according to the Kyiv Post’s sources.
Groysman preferred Buromensky to several more renowned candidates from abroad. These include Martha Boersch, a U.S. attorney who successfully prosecuted ex-Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko; Carlos Castresana Fernandez, a Spanish prosecutor who prosecuted 150 top officials at the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala; Giovanni Kessler, the director-general of the European Anti-Fraud Office, and Robert Storch, a deputy inspector general of the United States.
“Robert Storch, Giovanni Kessler, Carlos Castresana, Martha Boersch – world-famous foreign prosecutors with experience of jailing corrupt officials – didn’t impress Groysman,” Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, said on Facebook. “He chose as a NABU auditor Mykhailo Buromensky – a Ukrainian who doesn’t have any experience in law enforcement abroad, as stipulated by the law.”
The Cabinet’s supporters argued that Buromensky has such experience since he has worked at international organizations, but Kaleniuk countered that he had not been involved in any anti-corruption investigations abroad.
“The countdown (until the NABU leadership’s dismissal) has begun,” she said. “Don’t expect a single independent foreign auditor of the NABU. The government is poised to appoint three auditors that they can influence.”
Kaleniuk said that Buromensky’s appointment violates the International Monetary Fund’s memorandum of understanding with Ukraine. The memorandum stipulates that a NABU auditor must have “experience in anti-corruption investigations in other countries.”
Meanwhile, the NABU on May 26 again clashed with a major representative of the incumbent authorities. The bureau searched the office and house of Pavlo Vovk, head of the Kyiv Administrative District Court and an ally of Poroshenko’s gray cardinal and lawmaker Oleksandr Hranovsky.
Lawyer Oleksandra Yanovska, another loyalist of the authorities, is the front-runner to become an auditor of the NABU delegated by parliament. She has lashed out at the NABU’s current leadership.
Nigel Brown, a protégé of Poroshenko’s gray cardinals Hranovsky and Ihor Kononenko, is also competing for the job of a NABU auditor delegated by parliament. However, Poroshenko’s party failed to push Brown through parliament in March.
Parliament is also set to consider a bill banning the anti-graft bureau from starting cases against top officials if other law enforcers had previously closed similar cases against them. Last year parliament failed to pass a similar bill to restrict the bureau’s independence.
The Prosecutor General’s Office has also opened an investigation against Gizo Uglava, a deputy chief of the NABU, accusing him of hiding his Georgian citizenship and tax evasion. Uglava denied the accusations and interpreted the case as part of the authorities’ efforts to destroy the anti-graft bureau.
