Ukraine’s state-funded public television channel is one of the least-watched stations, but reaches almost every home in Ukraine. And it has angered Ukraine’s politicians because it airs hard-hitting investigative shows — Schemes, Nashi Hroshi and Slidtsvo.info — that expose top officials’ corruption.
So when its CEO, Zurab Alasania, got fired on Jan. 31, two months before the Ukrainian presidential election, many saw the move as censorship.
Suspilne Telebachennya’s (Public Television) board said in the initial draft decision on Alasania’s firing that the channel failed to extensively cover events featuring President Petro Poroshenko. But the board removed this from the final draft of the decision, according to the minutes of the Jan. 31 meeting released on Feb. 6.
The board denied accusations of censorship and gave the official justification for the firing as financial mismanagement, allegations that Alasania refuted.
The dismissal is yet another setback for a station launched in 2015 to replace the state-owned Pershy Natsionalny (First National) channel.
The channel, which has been run by Alasania from the beginning, was intended to become Ukraine’s equivalent of the BBC, a taxpayer-funded broadcaster independent from the government.
But the money and the audience never came in sufficient quantities.
The Presidential Administration said on Feb. 1 it had always supported “the creation of an independent public broadcaster,” but in November parliament cut the channel’s 2019 budget to Hr 1.5 billion ($56 million) from the Hr 1.8 billion ($67 million) envisaged by the public broadcasting law.
The future of the project is further clouded by Alasania’s dismissal.
While the station is watched by less than 1 percent of the country’s population, the potential is high. Suspilne is available in 93 percent of Ukrainian households, topping any private channel, even the popular oligarch-owned ones.
Financial reasons?
According to the minutes of the Jan. 31 board meeting, Alasania is accused of unlawfully delegating key functions to the executive director and spending Hr 8 million ($320,000) on the executive director’s office in 2017 to 2018.
Alasania told the Kyiv Post that delegating these functions was lawful, had been envisaged by the company’s rules and was approved by the supervisory board.
He is also accused of pursuing an “unbalanced and contradictory financial policy” by providing unpaid leave for some employees, while spending money on procurement, repairs and bonuses. Alasania said the board doesn’t understand the budget rules and that money was spent in accordance with Suspilne’s contractual obligations.
The board also accused Alasania of failing to properly file financial reports, leading EY to refuse an audit. But Alasania attributed the audit failure to discrepancies between international and domestic financial reporting standards.
Different versions
The final official justification is at odds with an initial draft.
In that, Suspilne was criticized for insufficiently covering a religious procession as part of Poroshenko’s efforts to create a united national church, as well as events attended by Poroshenko, including a Kharkiv economic forum and a United Nations meeting. The station was taken to task also for its “falsely interpreted principle of neutrality towards the government.”
The minutes say that 12 of the board’s 16 members were present at the Jan. 31 meeting, with nine voting in favor and three against firing Alasania in a secret and anonymous ballot.
Supervisory board members Svitlana Ostapa, Vadym Miskyi and Oleksandr Pavlichenko voted to keep Alasania.
Pavlichenko said in his dissenting opinion that the secret and anonymous vote violated legal provisions on the transparency of board meetings.
In response to the accusation, board chairwoman Tetiana Lebedeva argued that the secret ballot was a legal and necessary step to protect board members from external pressure.
Censorship?
Dozens of independent journalists signed a joint statement on Feb. 1 in protest against Alasania’s dismissal, saying it was a case of censorship.
In December, Natalie Sedletska, the chief editor of Schemes, an investigative unit of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, said that her sources warned her that Suspilne’s supervisory board was about to consider stopping the broadcasting of Schemes and Nashi Hroshi.
She attributed this to the Presidential Administration’s dissatisfaction with their coverage ahead of the presidential election.
Nashi Hroshi and Schemes have released a number of big investigations of top officials, often involving Poroshenko or his inner circle. In January 2018, Schemes revealed that Poroshenko had gone on a luxurious Maldives vacation.
Lebedeva argued that Suspilne’s board had neither the power nor intention to remove the investigative shows it buys from other firms. She said, however, that the board was considering a move to produce its own shows instead of buying external ones such as Schemes.
