The Kyiv Administrative District Court on Dec. 7 rejected whistleblower Hanna Solomatina’s lawsuit to be reinstated at the National Agency for Preventing Corruption (NAPC).
Solomatina, ex-head of the NAPC’s department for financial monitoring, told the Kyiv Post on Dec. 8 she would appeal the decision all the way up to the European Court of Human Rights.
“The judge lowered her eyes and read the decision,” Solomatina said. “Apparently she was instructed to make ‘the right decision’.”
The Kyiv District Administrative Court is headed by Pavlo Vovk, who is accused of having links to Oleksandr Hranovsky, a lawmaker from President Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc. Hranovsky denies influencing the judiciary.
Solomatina submitted her resignation in October 2017 due to her frustration with the situation at the NAPC but later withdrew her resignation request. However, the NAPC fired her nonetheless after she criticized the agency in a comment for the Kyiv Post.
She said her dismissal was unlawful, while the agency denied the accusations.
She also said in November that the agency was involved in large-scale corruption and was completely controlled by the Presidential Administration. The NAPC and the Presidential Administration denied the accusations.
Solomatina published what she says is correspondence in which Oleksiy Horashchenkov, a Presidential Administration official, tries to give her orders. In July Horashchenkov was fired from the Presidential Administration.
Botched criminal case
She also told the Kyiv Post on Dec. 8 that the criminal case into her corruption accusations had seen no progress so far, no notices of suspicion had been filed and no documents had been seized as part of the case.
In November 2017, the NAPC corruption case was transferred on the orders of Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky and Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko from the independent National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) to the presidentially controlled Security Service of Ukraine, in what critics, including Solomatina, believe to be an effort to destroy the case.
The Kyiv Post has obtained the documents from the audit on which the corruption investigation is based.
The Security Service of Ukraine did not respond to a request for comment.
No progress
Oleksandr Lemenov, an anti-corruption expert at the Reanimation Package of Reforms, argued that there had been no progress whatsoever in the NAPC’s work, and the problem can only be solved by firing the NAPC’s whole leadership.
The NAPC has initiated administrative and criminal cases against some top officials recently, but Lemenov and Solomatina argued the agency had not seriously investigated anyone of significance, and even the few major cases that were initiated will likely yield no results. They argued the NAPC is completely controlled by the Presidential Administration.
Moreover, the NAPC is using its powers to crack down on opponents of the government for political purposes, they said.
Lemenov said that Ukraine’s Western donors and Ukrainian authorities have discussed transferring electronic declaration checks to the NABU from the NAPC due to the agency’s impotence. The NAPC has denied the accusations of sabotage.
Automatic checks
In October the NACP said it had started testing an automatic system of checking electronic asset declarations. However, the system has not been launched so far.
The NAPC’s civic oversight council has called on the parliament and Cabinet to make sure that the automatic system is launched by February 2019.
The launch of automatic checks has been a demand of Ukraine’s Western partners for years. Currently, e-declarations are checked manually, which thwarts the process and makes it much more difficult.
Korchak case
Meanwhile, the Ukrainski Noviny news agency reported on Dec. 6, citing a source at the Prosecutor General’s Office, that the NABU had sent a notice of suspicion for ex-NAPC Chief Natalia Korchak for the second time to the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office. The anti-corruption prosecutors are considering authorizing the charges.
Korchak is under investigation for failing to declare a Skoda Octavia A7 car.
According to audio recordings of Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Kholodnytsky published by the NABU in March, he refused to authorize a search warrant for Korchak, and the search warrant request was returned to the NABU.
“Fuck them! Don’t they have any other cases, and they’re playing with Korchak?” he told a prosecutor involved in the case.
Kholodnytsky has confirmed the authenticity of the recordings but said they were “taken out of context.”
Solomatina argued that Kholodnytsky is still blocking the Korchak case. The anti-corruption prosecutor’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the issue.
