The Prosecutor General’s Office on Nov. 17 took the criminal case into the alleged corruption at a top anti-corruption agency from the independent National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, known as the NABU, which started it, and passed it to the Security Service of Ukraine.
The transfer is deemed by critics to be an effort to bury the case since the Security Service of Ukraine, known as the SBU, is controlled by the President’s Administration, while the NABU is independent of it.
It was the President’s Administration that was accused of influencing the anti-corruption body, the National Agency for Preventing Corruption, which was why NABU started the investigation into it. An SBU official was also implicated in testimony that started the case.
The investigation into the NAPC began after Hanna Solomatina, head of the agency’s department for financial and lifestyle monitoring, on Nov. 14 blew the whistle on her own agency, accusing it of being a political tool of President Petro Poroshenko, and being involved in mass-scale corruption and other crimes.
Solomatina denounced Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko and Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky for the decision to transfer the case from the NABU to the less-trusted security service.
“Shame, Yuriy Lustenko! Shame, Nazar Kholodnytsky!” Solomatina and Oksana Divnich, head of the NAPC’s internal audit unit, said in a joint statement on Nov. 18. “You have betrayed the trust of Ukraine’s first genuine whistleblowers.”
They said that the transfer of the case to the SBU would constitute a conflict of interest because Solomatina’s testimony implicates Serhiy Karpushin, an SBU official and simultaneously an advisor to NAPC Chief Natalia Korchak.
Solomatina said that before going public with the accusations, she brought them to the Prosecutor General’s Office. But Karpushin, who was supposed to transfer her documents to the Prosecutor General’s Office, effectively blocked the transfer and returned them to the NAPC, she said.
Solomatina and Divnich said they trusted only the NABU to handle the case.
Deadly conflict
The transfer comes amid an acute conflict between the NABU and the Prosecutor General’s Office, with the agencies investigating each other’s alleged wrongdoings.
The NABU on Nov. 17 opened an unlawful enrichment case against Lutsenko.
Lutsenko said the case was related to his son Oleksandr’s parking lots on 42 Peremohy Ave. in Kyiv.
According to an investigation by the Nashi Hroshi anti-graft watchdog, eight luxury apartments in the building where the parking lots are located are leased out by Lutsenko’s son.
Svitlana Ryzhenko, a retiree and a former accountant of Lutsenko’s wife, used to legally own these apartments, as well as a $1 million apartment in Russian-annexed Crimea. Lutsenko, who has been accused of failing to declare the real estate and using a figurehead to control it, denied the accusations, saying he had nothing to do with the property.
Meanwhile, the Prosecutor General’s Office on Nov. 16 opened a case against NABU Chief Artem Sytnyk, accusing him of divulging a secret of the investigation during an interview with journalists last summer. He was talking about top prosecutor Kostyantyn Kulik, a suspect in a corruption case.
Radical Party lawmaker Ihor Mosiychuk said on Oct. 17 that the Prosecutor General’s Office had also opened an embezzlement case against the NABU’s leadership over purchases of clothing by the bureau from Volodymyr Lytvyn, a suspect in the NABU’s criminal case into backpack supplies to the Interior Ministry. Interior Minister Arsen Avakov’s son Oleksandr has also been charged by the NABU in the backpack supply case.
The NABU denies accusations of wrongdoing, saying the purchases were made through the ProZorro transparent procurement system.
Collapse of investigations
The war between the NABU and prosecutors also comes as the anti-graft agency faces the possible collapse of its investigations due to legal obstacles this month, which some see as another effort by the authorities to obstruct its work.
The NABU said on Nov. 15 that, if Poroshenko signs recent amendments to procedural codes, this would lead to “the collapse of the work of the NABU and other investigative agencies and paralyze Ukraine’s law enforcement system.”
The amendments, which were passed by parliament on Oct. 3, may kill any corruption investigations due to the limited term of investigations and other hurdles they impose.
According to the initial text of an amendment initiated by Radical Party lawmaker Andriy Lozovy, prosecutors would have to file notices of suspicion for suspects in criminal cases within six months for grave crimes, and within three months for crimes of medium severity. Moreover, all cases must be sent to trial within two months after a notice of suspicion is filed, according to the amendment.
People’s Front lawmaker Leonid Yemets said on Oct. 5 that the final version of the codes envisaged a term of one-and-a-half years for grave crimes, and one year for crimes of medium severity. The courts will be able to block investigations by refusing to extend their terms, and their decisions to close cases cannot be appealed.
Critics say the new terms are still insufficient. Sergii Gorbatuk, head of the in absentia unit at the Prosecutor General’s Office, said that, if they are applied to already-open cases, the amendments may also lead to the closure of ongoing major corruption and murder investigations.
The NABU also said that it would have to stop all of its ongoing graft invetsigations when the Prosecutor General’s Office transfers its cases to the NABU by the Nov. 20 deadline, unless parliament immediately passes amendments extending the deadline.
The Prosecutor General’s Office is supposed to transfer about 3,500 cases to the NABU, which has only 200 detectives. This would effectively bury the bureau.
“This week, two parallel processes were going on in Ukraine,” reformist lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko said on Facebook on Nov. 18. “The first one is the destruction of the NABU through all possible means… The second one is to destroy (ex-Georgian President Mikheil) Saakashvili.”
Four more Georgian associates of Saakashvili, an opposition politician, were kidnapped by camouflaged masked people on Nov. 17, including a journalist and two veterans of the war with Russia. It is still not clear where they are.
