In 2017, State Fiscal Service head Roman Nasirov gave Ukraine hope for a breakthrough in its fight against corruption — by becoming the highest-ranking official to be charged with corruption while in office.
His arrest on charges of fraud and abuse of office that incurred multimillion-dollar losses for the state budget was a historic feat for the independent anti-corruption agencies.
But the trial has dragged on for more than a year now, and Nasirov’s prospects are looking so good that he’s running for president as one of the 44 candidates in a crowded field.
Although he is not yet cleared of charges that he denies, he is out of jail on bail with no end in sight to his trial.
Sitting down for an interview with the Kyiv Post on Feb. 5, he looks neat and healthy — completely different from the Nasirov that the public remembers from two years ago in court. Back then, he was wrapped in a plaid blanket, lying on a stretcher behind bars in the defendant’s dock. He looked distinctly unwell.
Nasirov is also doing better professionally. He got his old government job back after a court found his firing from the State Fiscal Service violated formal procedures.
But he hasn’t gotten back to work yet. While the Cabinet of Ministers appeals the court decision, Nasirov has seized the moment to seek the presidency. He may now freely travel around the country but cannot leave Ukraine.
Nasirov, formerly a lawmaker with President Petro Poroshenko’s party, said he “realized that having political power is the only way to make real changes in the country. And a president has such power.”
But with a polling rating below 0.1 percent, his chances for the presidency are — quite literally — close to zero, says Oleksiy Haran, professor of political science at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and research director at the Democratic Initiatives Foundation.
Haran views Nasirov’s election bid as an attempt to gain leverage in his trial, which he tries to present as political persecution of him.
“I don’t believe that he can re-emerge in any public office. No parliamentary faction would want to have a member with his reputation,” Haran told the Kyiv Post. “His only option to try running for the parliament is a single-member constituency.”
The trial
Nasirov entered Ukrainian politics as a lawmaker with the dominant 135-member Petro Poroshenko Bloc in the Ukrainian parliament. Having worked for investment companies in London, he appeared to be a modern young top manager with Western experience, just the kind Ukraine wanted after the EuroMaidan Revolution swept Kremlin-backed President Viktor Yanukovych from power five years ago.
Nasirov left parliament in 2015 to become the head of the State Fiscal Service, which enjoys vast power in collecting taxes and controlling customs.
But the events of March 2017 looked like the end to Nasirov’s career.
Detectives from the National Anti-Corruption Bureau found that, as tax chief, Nasirov authorized a delay in paying a tax on subsoil use worth Hr 2 billion ($74 million) for three gas extraction companies affiliated with fugitive lawmaker Oleksandr Onyshchenko, who is suspected of defrauding state gas producer UkrGasVydobuvannya out of Hr 740 million ($27 million).
Onyshchenko had fled Ukraine months earlier, so Nasirov was the next big fish for the investigators.
On the day before anti-corruption investigators served him a notice of suspicion, Nasirov reportedly suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized, which some deemed an attempt to avoid prosecution. But Nasirov says he has lived with chronic hypertension, or high blood pressure, for years.
Despite his ailments, Nasirov was brought to the courthouse, where the judge eventually ruled to keep him in a pre-trial detention center for two months and set a record-breaking bail of Hr 100 million ($3.7 million).
Fortunately for Nasirov, his family could afford to post the money needed to get him released under house arrest. His wife and his father-in-law, construction magnate Oleksandr Glimbovsky, paid the record sum.
Nasirov was also suspended from his public office for the time of the investigation. And less than a year later, Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman fired him for holding a British passport.
He denies having any other citizenship besides Ukrainian, despite confirmation letters that NABU says it obtained from British authorities.
Nasirov also calls the charges lies and denies any wrongdoing. He says he simply did his job.
“It wasn’t writing off taxes. It was tax restructuring at a 36 percent annual rate with some assets as collateral. Thousands of companies got their taxes restructured in the same period of time,” he said. “Those companies submitted requests for tax restructuring. I signed them. And I would do it again because it was their right by law.”
NABU claimed there were no grounds for tax deferral for the three companies, nor did the Ministry of Finance approve the move. Detectives accused Nasirov of incurring Hr 2 billion ($74 million) in losses for the state budget.
Nasirov believes the case against him is politically motivated. He doesn’t name anyone he suspects of organizing it. He said he has filed a claim to the European Court for Human Rights and has sued NABU and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, or SAP.
In December 2017, the investigation into Nasirov ended, and SAP took the case to court, where it remains to this day.
So far, his defense has effectively manipulated formal procedures to their own advantage, says Olena Shcherban, a lawyer at the Anti-Corruption Action Center, an anti-graft organization that is closely monitoring Nasirov’s case.
Currently, judges are still announcing — literally, reading aloud — the 774-page indictment during monthly court sessions. At that pace, it could take at least another year before the judges actually begin to review the case.
Nasirov blames the court for dragging its feet. But it was his attorneys who requested that the lengthy indictment be read in full.
Nasirov says this is required by law. But the same judicial procedure also states that the trial may start with the announcement of a brief summary of the indictment if neither side requests the full version.
In another case, the Kyiv District Court judge who reinstated Nasirov as State Fiscal Service chief didn’t consider a letter from the British Embassy in Kyiv as adequate confirmation of Nasirov’s U.K. citizenship because it hadn’t been signed by the ambassador.
“A Ukrainian court can’t dictate to the authorities of another country how their formal documents should look, which stamp (it should have), etc. It is a dangerous precedent when a Ukrainian court dismisses official replies from the U.K. authorities,” Shcherban said.
Former Finance Minister Oleksandr Danyliuk said that Nasirov’s case demonstrated why Ukraine needs an independent anti-corruption court.
“Nasirov really does not deserve attention, he is just one of the hundreds — but his case became a litmus test as to the seriousness of the government intentions to fight corruption,” he wrote in his op-ed for the Kyiv Post on Feb. 6.
“The case also serves as a verdict to Ukraine’s judiciary — since 2014 courts proved to be the biggest and most faithful allies of the corrupt officials in their attempts to save impunity and the status quo.”
Danylyuk, sacked by a parliamentary vote in June 2018 following a conflict with Groysman, accused Nasirov of sabotaging reform of the tax system. Nasirov hit back by calling him unprofessional and not collaborative.
Political views
“You can only do big reforms by having the ability to change the legislation,” Nasirov says. “Investigating what happened in the past is important but even more so is to build a new country with new laws and new ways of living.”
Like an amputee feeling phantom pain in a missing limb, Nasirov still wants to renew the tax and customs codes and reform the fiscal system.
“First, we have to decide on what kind of tax system we want to have and what kind of taxes we want to leave. Based on that, we can start reforming the (State) Fiscal Service because, right now, we can’t even cut the staff with the old tax code,” he said.
After all he’s been through recently, judicial reform and the battle with corruption are also on Nasirov’s presidential to-do list.
He believes that independent anti-corruption bodies — NABU, SAP, and the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption — have failed to deliver results. He proposes completely relaunching them with new management.
“As an active member of this society and a person who understands these processes, I want to know: Where is the fight with corruption that we were hoping for? Where are the real cases of (prosecuting) those who take bribes?” he asks.
At the heart of corruption are the low salaries of civil servants and lawmakers, he says.
“People can’t live on $100 a month, they will look for ways to earn. This is what makes the entire state system corrupt.”
He targets businesspeople and the middle class for support in the March 31 vote. “I believe that it’s my task to represent them,” Nasirov said. “All my life, I worked in business. I know their problems very well and know how to solve them.”
Nasirov considers himself to be middle class, even though his last asset declaration reveals that he and his spouse are wealthy property owners with a taste for luxury goods, such as expensive watches, jewelry, designer bags, artwork, and collections of wine.
The couple owns 5.3 hectares of land in Nasirov’s native Chernihiv Oblast, a 157-square-meter apartment in Kyiv, and a 414-square-meter house in Kozyn, an elite town 30 kilometers outside of Kyiv, where his neighbors include Poroshenko, former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and other top politicians.
Nasirov and his wife also reported owning $2.3 million in assets, including nearly $300,000 in a brokerage account in the U.K., which Nasirov did not declare when he was in office. A Kyiv court arrested these funds on Feb. 14 at the request of anti-corruption prosecutors.
