See the first part of the interview.
Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko is under pressure to cleanse the prosecutor’s office – a notorious Soviet relic rife with corruption and abuse of power – of controversial employees.
His plan is to hire new ones in a transparent competition next year. But he’s keeping the old guard at least until then.
In an interview with the Kyiv Post, he argued that he cannot fire the old ones because he needs them to deliver quick results in high-profile investigations as Ukrainians become increasingly dismayed by the lack of justice.
Lutsenko defended his predecessor Viktor Shokin’s team, which has been accused of sabotaging investigations and fabricating political cases.
Among others, the team comprises Deputy Prosecutor General Yury Stolyarchuk, who is in charge of all investigations, and Kyiv’s chief prosecutor Roman Hovda, who deny the accusations.
“Don’t look for a replacement for Stolyarchuk, there is none,” Lutsenko said. “The system he heads works efficiently only under him… It’s inefficient to change horses, not even in midstream, but at the finish.”
Lutsenko argued that he cannot hire new people in transparent competitions and complete high-profile investigations simultaneously.
He said, however, that he was planning to launch competitions for all top prosecutors’ jobs in mid-2017.
Scandalous prosecutor
One of the most controversial top prosecutors is Dmytro Sus, a deputy head of the department for high-profile economic cases. He has been accused of fabricating political cases on behalf of President Petro Poroshenko’s top allies Ihor Kononenko and Oleksandr Hranovsky, driving a luxury car beyond his means to afford and allegedly torturing employees of the anti-corruption bureau who were conducting surveillance over him in a graft case in August – accusations that he denies.
Lutsenko said he had decided not to fire Sus because a probe into his property had determined there had been no wrongdoing.
But Lutsenko said that the public scandal had forced him to transfer Sus to a different department and put him in charge of recovering stolen assets abroad. “If he succeeds, he will be rehabilitated,” Lutsenko said. “If he doesn’t, he will leave the prosecutor’s office.”
Meanwhile, the Prosecutor General’s Office contradicted Lutsenko’s words in an official response, saying that Sus was still a deputy head of the department.
Another contradiction is that the prosecutor’s office said untrustworthy information had been found in Sus’ declaration since he failed to declare the Audi car and he was subject to “disciplinary punishment.”
Meanwhile, Sus and his family declared $38,000 in cash and precious stones worth $8,100 in his electronic asset declaration filed in October.
Total impunity
Despite his reluctance to fire controversial prosecutors, Lutsenko admitted that “prosecutors are used to total impunity, and nobody has ever jailed a prosecutor.”
He said that the Prosecutor General’s Office had investigated 19 prosecutors in corruption cases since he took over. The Prosecutor General’s Office told the Kyiv Post that Lutsenko had also fired five prosecutors suspected of crimes.
Lutsenko said that the unit for checking prosecutors’ property, headed by Petro Shkutyak, had failed to uncover much evidence of corruption due to a lack of complaints about prosecutors filed by civic activists.
“The checks didn’t work well,” he said. “Only a few have been fired, there’s nothing to boast about here.”
Lustration
Lutsenko has also been faulted for appointing and failing to fire prosecutors who worked under ex-President Viktor Yanukovych and who, under the lustration law, should be fired.
These include Shkutyak and Maxim Melnychenko, the head of the Inspectorate General.
Lutsenko claimed that the Justice Ministry had not mentioned Shkutyak and Melnychenko among those who should be lustrated, and also argued that Shkutyak’s job was not covered by the lustration law.
However, Tetiana Kozachenko, the head of the Justice Ministry’s lustration department, said this was not true and showed to the Kyiv Post documents requesting the dismissal of Melnychenko and Shkutyak that had been previously sent to the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Lutsenko also said that he had no power to fire Oleh Valendyuk, a deputy chief prosecutor of Crimea, because a controversial court ruling had blocked his dismissal under the lustration law.
“You think the court ruling is bizarre, for me it’s even more than bizarre,” he said. “But nonetheless, according to this ruling, he’s not subject to lustration.”
Kozachenko and other critics have dismissed Lutsenko’s explanation as an excuse, given that other agencies have found legal ways to fire officials whose lustration was blocked by the courts.
Politicizing prosecution
While failing to fire controversial prosecutors, Lutsenko has also refused to re-hire reformers like ex-deputy prosecutor generals Davit Sakvarelidze and Vitaly Kasko, who were forced out in early 2016 after a bitter conflict with Shokin.
Lutsenko took issue with Sakvarelidze’s disloyalty to Poroshenko and his use of the term “temporary president” to refer to him. He said that he would not re-hire Sakvarelidze, because he “had been immersed too deeply into Ukrainian politics.”
“There can be only one politician here – in this chair, and even that is wrong,” Lutsenko said, referring to himself.
Instead of hiring reformers, Lutsenko preferred to give top jobs to political appointees like Dmytro Storozhuk, a lawmaker from the People’s Front party, and Petro Shkutyak, a regional legislator from the Poroshenko Bloc. Lutsenko claimed, however, that they were not politicians.
Anti-graft bureau
In another clash with reformers, Lutsenko has been accused of initiating legislative changes to strip the newly-created National Anti-Corruption Bureau, the only law enforcement body independent of President Petro Poroshenko, of its authority.
Two similar bills submitted by lawmakers from the Poroshenko Bloc seek to enable agencies other than the bureau to investigate top-level corruption and give the prosecutor general more power.
If passed, such legislation would undermine the original plan to have all top-level corruption cases investigated by the independent National Anti-Corruption Bureau.
Lutsenko told the Kyiv Post that he would not infringe on the anti-graft bureau’s independence.
At the same time, he defended the proposed legislation, saying he doubted the bureau’s capacity and wanted all law enforcement agencies to participate in the fight against corruption.
“The monopoly of the anti-corruption bureau is as bad as that of the Prosecutor General’s Office,” he said.
Lutsenko said that the proposed bill would not give the prosecutor general the right to take cases away from the anti-graft bureau, but only give other agencies an equal right to open new high-profile corruption cases.
Currently, the bureau has the exclusive right to investigate major corruption cases. The Prosecutor General’s Office has the right to investigate minor graft cases, as well as the major corruption cases that it started before the bureau’s launch in late 2015.
Claims challenged
But the anti-graft bureau and Vitaly Shabunin and Anastasia Krasnosilska of the Anti-Corruption Action Center interpret the proposed change differently. They say it would effectively eliminate the bureau’s independence.
The bills seek to give the prosecutor general the power to “define the jurisdiction” of any corruption case. That means that Lutsenko would be able to both take away cases from the anti-graft bureau and enable other agencies to open new major graft cases, the bureau and the Anti-Corruption Action Center argue.
Krasnosilska said that the authorities could use this to protect high-profile suspects by letting the Security Service of Ukraine, the National Police or the Prosecutor General’s Office, which are seen as dependent on political leaders, carry out graft investigations against them, delaying and sabotaging the cases.
Who’s better?
Lutsenko criticized the National Anti-Corruption Bureau for not opening a criminal case against reformist lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko over his purchase of a Hr 7.5 million apartment. The bureau said in September that Leshchenko could have committed a misdemeanor by taking out an interest-free loan to fund the purchase and that it was in the jurisdiction of the National Agency for Preventing Corruption.
“There is a complaint against Leshchenko but it’s not even being registered,” Lutsenko said. “This is bad. The Security Service of Ukraine should have a right to go after friends of the anti-corruption bureau. And – since you suspect that I like (Poroshenko ally and lawmaker Oleksandr) Hranovsky – the National Anti-Corruption Bureau should have a right to catch Lutsenko’s friends.”
Lutsenko claimed that the Prosecutor General’s Office was better at sending corruption cases to trial than the Anti-Corruption Bureau.
According to charts provided by Lutsenko, the bureau’s 175 detectives have sent 31 cases to court this year, while the 790 investigators of the Prosecutor General’s Office have sent 614 indictments in graft cases. The Prosecutor General’s Office declined to provide a detailed list of the cases.
Lutsenko’s opponents dismiss his statistics as misleading.
The bureau told the Kyiv Post that 600 of the 614 investigations were minor corruption cases that did not fall under its jurisdiction.
Apart from the 790 investigators, Lutsenko’s office has about 14,000 other employees and also gets information on corruption from the approximately 30,000 strong Security Service of Ukraine’s anti-corruption unit, the Anti-Corruption Action Center’s representatives said.
The center’s representatives also argued that, while the bureau was taking on politically influential suspects, the Prosecutor General’s Office had been reluctant to prosecute top politicians and officials.
Moreover, many of the cases cited by Lutsenko were opened before the bureau’s launch in late 2015, the anti-graft watchdog said.
