See the second part of the interview.
Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko is running low on time as society’s demands are rising for justice in high-profile corruption and murder cases.
So far, Lutsenko has little to show since taking over in May from his discredited predecessor, Viktor Shokin, whose post-EuroMaidan Revolution legacy is that of stonewalling high-level criminal cases against politically powerful suspects.
Lutsenko is the fourth general prosecutor since President Viktor Yanukovych fled to Russia and is so far no more effective than his three predecessors.
Lutsenko, who vaulted to political fame 16 years ago as an anti-corruption crusader and activist against ex-President Leonid Kuchma, is feeling the heat. At least he was during a three-hour interview recently with the Kyiv Post in his office.
When the Kyiv Post wanted to talk about stalled or non-existent investigations against such public figures as Kuchma or Yanukovych allies, including billionaire oligarch Dmytro Firtash, ex-Deputy Prime Minister Yuriy Boyko and ex-chief of staff Serhiy Lyovochkin, Lutsenko flashed anger and threatened to end the interview.
Lutsenko said no one had a right to tell him who to prosecute. “If you’re interested in last names, I’m ending this interview,” he said.
Instead, he preferred to draw diagrams on paper about his plans for reorganizing the office of 15,000 prosecutors (mainly by hiring new prosecutors at lower levels next year). He showed statistics about how much more effective he is than the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine and boasted about criminal cases launched against comparatively minor figures.
Almost three years since the EuroMaidan Revolution began, former Yanukovych-era Justice Minister Oleksandr Lavrynovych is the only high-ranking person against whom a criminal case has been sent to trial.
The docket of unpunished crimes, including multibillion-dollar financial theft and murders, stretches back decades in Ukraine, including the Sept. 16, 2000, murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze and the murders of more than 100 EuroMaidan demonstrators in 2014.
Lutsenko is no more successful in recovering any of the $40 billion in money and assets allegedly stolen, by his own official estimates, during the Yanukovych era from 2010-2014.
He has deadlines coming up. Lutsenko said he needs to produce results by April in sending Yanukovych-era cases to trial. Another deadline is in a year, when the Prosecutor General’s Office will have to transfer its investigative functions to the yet-to-be-created State Investigation Bureau.
Some of his deadlines are self-imposed. He has no intention of serving his five-year term and said he will leave in 2017.
“I have a year-and-a-half, and I will use it to the fullest,” he said. “Only a major politician could stop people influencing the Prosecutor General’s Office. I hope I’m the last politically appointed prosecutor general. My task is to use my political weight to break this Soviet dinosaur.”
To make a dent in the backlog of stifled or stonewalled cases, as well as overhaul the service, Lutsenko brings with him no law degree or prosecutorial experience. But he does bring with him the mixed blessing of political clout, appointed by President Petro Poroshenko, who clung to Shokin and who Lutsenko served in parliament as head of the presidential faction of 143 lawmakers. Many see his association with Poroshenko as part of the problem as corruption continues to flourish, including allegedly by Poroshenko allies.
In Lutsenko’s quest to remake the prosecutor’s office, however, he is keeping tainted prosecutors and investigators in powerful positions. “Don’t ask me whether these investigators are good or bad… I’m squeezing a socially useful result out of them with my own hands,” he said.
Litany of problems
The Soviet-style prosecutor’s office that Lutsenko is trying to break has been the all-powerful judge of guilt or innocence throughout much of Ukraine’s history as a nation.
It has operated as a political weapon, subservient to the president, working to protect the powerful and corrupt rather than prosecute them. On the other hand, those who fall out of political favor – as Lutsenko did during the Yanukovych era – feel the sting of politicized verdicts. Lutsenko spent two years in prison on bogus charges of abuse of office as interior minister. He was the second highest-profile political prisoner during the Yanukovych era, after ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
In wielding their powers, prosecutors have dictated verdicts to the nation’s 7,500 judges, who form another distrusted and detested institution in Ukraine. Even though the constitution provides for jury trials, in which citizens decide guilt or innocence, politicians have refused to surrender control.
This is why leading lawyers in Kyiv – among them Irina Paliashvili, who heads the legal committee for the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council – have called for the current institutions to be dismantled and replaced with new ones. Lutsenko agrees with this prescription. Before new institutions are formed, he said, it’s his duty to squeeze as much out of the current ones as possible.
But the problems with prosecutors are not relegated to the Soviet past.
They persist today, say lawyers who talked to the Kyiv Post, many of whom talked not for attribution because they feared retribution.
They charge that prosecutors are inspecting, auditing and investigating businesses to extort money from them and carrying out pre-trial investigations for years to obstruct business operations. Lawyers also complain that prosecutors disregard evidence and the positions of defense attorneys and pressure judges for favorable rulings. They also fail to enforce unfavorable court rulings or consider allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.
Admits problems
Lutsenko knows the agency he heads had been rife with graft and has blocked cases due to political interference. “Given what I saw, the cases have often been artificially blocked,” Lutsenko said.
But despite his close ties to Poroshenko, who critics believe is the chief obstructionist to overhauling the judicial system, Lutsenko said that nobody dictates what he must do.
Lutsenko said the bank of white telephones next to his desk – which connect him to top officials – are not the problem that they used to be. He said his participation in the 2004 Orange Revolution and 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution, his jail term under Yanukovych and his defense of Ukraine in Russia’s war give him the right to say no to whoever tries to tell him what to do.
“I won’t say to whom I have said ‘no,’” Lutsenko said. “But I can assure you that not only do I say ‘no,’ but I also swear sometimes.”
He said that the president, foreign embassies, lawmakers and oligarchs had tried to influence him, but he would not yield to their demands.
While claiming to be independent of political influence, Lutsenko admits that he is loyal to the president, saying that he has a “bias.” When asked whether his predecessor Shokin’s extreme loyalty to Poroshenko had been a problem, he replied: “Aren’t I also (loyal)? What’s the point in demanding an answer from me?”
Grey cardinals
Two top allies of Poroshenko, lawmakers Ihor Kononenko and Oleksandr Hranovsky, have been accused of interfering with prosecutors, specifically with the anti-corruption unit known as the “Kononenko-Hranovsky department.”
But Lutsenko said that neither Kononenko nor Hranovsky influence the head of the unit, Volodymyr Hutsulyak, although “all lawmakers are trying to influence me… My task is not to succumb to that influence.”
Lutsenko said he meets regularly with lawmakers, including Kononenko and Hranovsky, but has banned them from approaching other prosecutors.
Yanukovych cases
Aside from fending off attempts by allies to influence his decisions, Lutsenko’s ability to deliver results involving Yanukovych and his alles will be key. The Prosecutor General’s Office is planning to send the cases to trial in November or December, Lutsenko said. The allegations against Yanukovych and allies include treason, murder and multibillion-dollar theft.
Lutsenko has feuded with Serhiy Horbatiuk, the head of the department for trials in absentia, over the timing of sending Yanukovych-era cases to trial. On Oct. 24, Lutsenko took away most of the cases from Horbatiuk’s unit.
Horbatiuk and the lawyers of slain EuroMaidan protesters argue that the cases are not ready and that legal obstacles make it impossible to send these cases to court by the end of this year. Horbatiuk has argued that the May law on trials in absentia contradicts Ukrainian and international law. As a result, either Yanukovych and his associates will not be convicted, or the convictions will be invalidated by the European Court of Human Rights, Horbatiuk and the lawyers say.
Lutsenko dismissed these arguments. “What’s the alternative? Wait for Yanukovych and the Berkut (riot police) murderers to come to Kyiv?” he said.
Lutsenko also said that 10 suspects had concluded plea bargains in the corruption cases against Yanukovych ally and tycoon Serhiy Kurchenko and Yanukovych’s Tax and Revenue Minister Oleksandr Klymenko.
Anti-corruption fight
Among his agency’s major results under his leadership, Lutsenko cited the arrest of Andriy Holovach, an ex-deputy tax police chief; Oleksiy Tkachenko, an ex-deputy chief of the National Bank of Ukraine; and Mykolayiv Oblast Deputy Governor Mykola Romanchuk in a $90,000 bribery case.
Romanchuk and four ex-tax officials charged in graft cases are already on trial, Lutsenko added.
But these are “small fish” in Ukraine’s sea of crime.
Lutsenko and his predecessors on the job have been lambasted for failing to take on some top politicians accused of wrongdoing, including Yanukovych allies Serhiy Lyovochkin, Dmytro Firtash and Yuriy Boiko.
Lutsenko said that there had never been a draft motion to strip Boiko of immunity in a theft case and dismissed reformist lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko’s claim to the contrary as “fantasies.”
Leshchenko has argued that the motion existed and was blocked by Shokin last year. He sent to the Kyiv Post part of what he says is the draft motion and promised to publish the full document soon. The authenticity of the document has been confirmed by two sources close to the Prosecutor General’s Office who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.
Lutsenko said that there could be “promising” investigations against Firtash, Lyovochkin’s sister Yulia, as well as tycoons Rinat Akhmetov, Ihor Kolomoisky, Viktor Pinchuk and Konstyantyn Grigorishin, although “it doesn’t mean they are guilty.”
He also said the Prosecutor General’s Office is checking 88 lawmakers for evidence of crimes, including ones from the People’s Front, Samopomich, the Radical Party, Batkyvshchyna, the Opposition Bloc and the Poroshenko Bloc.
“I understand that, to make you believe me, I have to prosecute an incumbent lawmaker from the Poroshenko Bloc,” he said. “We’re working on this. I’m looking at that very hard.”
Gongadze case
As for one of the unsolved murders that helped Lutsenko rise to fame as an anti-Kuchma crusader, the general prosecutor said that he has no information to make progress in the 2000 murder of Gongadze. Kuchma, who served as president from 1994-2005, remains the top suspect in ordering the assassination of the founder of the Ukrainska Pravda news website.
Former police Gen. Oleksiy Pukach is the highest-ranking of four law enforcement officials imprisoned for the murder. Lutsenko said prosecutors would question Pukach again to get more information on the organizer.
“I understand that Pukach was not the organizer,” he said. “At the current moment, I don’t have evidence that would allow investigators to move forward as far as the organizer is concerned.”
One bank fraud case
Lutsenko also cited limited progress in investigating bank fraud, the major reason for losses estimated at $11.4 billion since 2008. “For the first time in Ukrainian history, the head of a commercial bank (Ihor Doroshenko, ex-CEO of Mikhailovsky Bank) is under arrest,” he said.
However, the bank fraud investigations are thwarted by imperfect legislation and investigators’ lack of expertise, Lutsenko added.
Fighting activists
Apart from the slow progress in investigations, the prosecutor’s office has been criticized for allegedly fabricating political cases.
Lutsenko lashed out at the Anti-Corruption Action Center, which was prosecuted by Shokin in a case that critics deemed to be political. Lutsenko, who closed the case, said that the center was registering its employees as sole proprietors to minimize tax payments.
He added that the center had committed no crime, but argued it “it’s not very good… and I don’t want to discuss whether it’s right from the moral standpoint.”
Daria Kaleniuk, the executive director of the anti-graft watchdog, dismissed the accusations. “It’s immoral when a prosecutor general’s son gets income from a four-story building in the capital’s center formally owned by a rural pensioner who ‘just happens to be’ the accountant of the prosecutor general’s wife,” she said.
Svitlana Ryzhenko, the accountant and business partner of Lutsenko’s wife who lives in a village, used to own eight luxury apartments in downtown Kyiv that are leased out by Lutsenko’s son Oleksandr, as well as a $1 million apartment in Russian-annexed Crimea, according to an investigation by the Nashi Hroshi anti-graft watchdog and Ukraine’s corporate register. 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.
Kasko case
Another opponent of Shokin, reformist ex-Deputy Prosecutor General Vitaly Kasko, also faces prosecution. In April, Shokin’s prosecutors served a notice of suspicion to Kasko, who was accused of illegally privatizing his apartment. He believes the case was fabricated by Shokin’s team to take revenge on him for criticizing them.
“Kasko stole this apartment, I confirm it,” Lutsenko said. “The National Anti-Corruption Bureau has confirmed it. But I don’t want this case because it’s not the country’s main case, and it interferes with our work.”
Kasko responded to the accusations by saying that, contrary to Lutsenko’s claim, the bureau had never said he was guilty. In April Artem Sytnyk, the head of the bureau, said it had found no crime failing under its jurisdiction and transferred the case to the National Police, which is still investigating the case under Lutsenko’s supervision.
Commenting on whether the case was politically motivated, Lutsenko said that “Shokin was an old-fashioned man – he was challenged, and he responded to the challenge.”
