Kyiv’s Solomyansky Court on Jan. 17 fined Artem Sytnyk, head of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, Hr 1,700 for failing to give documents to the National Agency for Preventing Corruption, or NAPC, over an alleged conflict of interest.
The NABU is deemed to be independent of the authorities, while the NAPC is controlled by loyalists of President Petro Poroshenko.
The NABU denied all of the agency’s accusations. Sytnyk attributed the NAPC’s case against him to the authorities’ alleged attempts to restrict or destroy his bureau.
“One would have to be very naïve not to realize that the government will not forgive us for the cases that were are investigating, and will not leave us alone,” Sytnyk told Channel 5 in November, mentioning graft cases against ex-People’s Front party lawmaker Mykola Martynenko, State Fiscal Service Chief Roman Nasirov and Interior Minister Arsen Avakov’s son Oleksandr. “We were expecting a media attack on us with the use of loyal agencies like the National Agency for Preventing Corruption. I don’t rule out that they will further use their administrative resources such as notices of suspicion and arrests (against the NABU).”
The NAPC claimed that Sytnyk had violated conflict of interest rules by authorizing Igor Yarchak, head of the NABU’s legal department, to represent his interests in court.
Oleksandr Lemenov, an anti-corruption expert at the Reanimation Package of Reforms, dismissed the NAPC’s accusations as nonsense. He said that Sytnyk’s power of attorney for Yarchak was part of a widespread legitimate practice among Ukrainian officials.
For example, in January 2017 Pavlo Vovk, head of the Kyiv Administrative District Court, empowered Natalia Pentsova, head of the court’s legal department, to represent his interests in court. The NAPC found no violations in Vovk’s actions.
Meanwhile, the NABU said on Jan. 17 it had arrested four executives of three companies controlled by by Yaroslav Dubnevych and his brother Bohdan – lawmakers from the Poroshenko Bloc.
They are accused of embezzling 300 million cubic meters of natural gas worth Hr 1.4 billion belonging to state-owned oil and gas company NAftogaz.
Attack on NABU
The court decision against Sytnyk comes amid a long-running attack by the authorities against the NABU, which was set up to investigate top-level corruption.
Sasha Drik, head of the Declarations Under Control civic watchdog, wrote on Jan. 4 that the NAPC had issued a document that would allow it to block the NABU’s criminal cases into government officials’ electronic asset declarations.
According to the document, the NAPC believes that the NABU can only open cases into asset declarations with the NAPC’s approval, citing European standards.
In December, pro-government lawmakers submitted a bill that would enable parliament to fire Sytnyk without an audit of his performance. The bill was later removed from the agenda after Western criticism. However, it has not been withdrawn from parliament and may re-appear on the agenda again.
The pro-Poroshenko majority in the Rada also fired Yegor Sobolev, a staunch defender of the NABU, as chairman of parliament’s anti-corruption committee in December.
In November, the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Security Service of Ukraine disrupted a NABU corruption investigation into the State Migration Service by publishing the personal data of NABU undercover agents, blowing their cover. The agents were arrested and charged with provoking an official to take a bribe, which the NABU denies.
Pro-government lawmakers have also repeatedly tried to appoint loyal auditors in order to control and potentially fire Sytnyk. The pro-presidential majority on the committee on Jan. 17 again considered appointing a loyal NABU auditor.
NAPC graft
The NAPC has so far failed to find any criminal or administrative offenses in any of the top officials’ declarations.
Hanna Solomatina and Oksana Divnich, top officials of the NAPC, said in November that the agency is involved in large-scale corruption and completely controlled by the Presidential Administration. The NAPC and the Presidential Administration denied the accusations.
Solomatina published what she says is her correspondence with Oleksiy Horashchenkov, a Presidential Administration official, in which he is trying to give her orders. The Kyiv Post has also obtained the documents of an audit on which the corruption investigation is based.
Many of the declaration checks with alleged violations were conducted by Tetiana Shkrebko, a deputy head of the NAPC’s department for financial and lifestyle monitoring, according to the audit. Shkrebko was given a 5-year suspended sentence in 2016 for embezzling Hr 3 billion in a scheme spearheaded by ex-President Viktor Yanukovych and his Tax and Revenue Minister Oleksandr Klymenko, according to a secret ruling leaked to the Nashi Hroshi watchdog and published on Jan. 16.
In November a case into alleged NAPC corruption case was transferred on the orders of Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky and Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko from the independent NABU to the presidentially controlled SBU, in what critics, including Solomatina, believe to be an effort to destroy the case.
In December, Solomatina said that the NAPC’s leadership was pressuring, punishing and firing whistleblowers, while a competition commission, one of whose members is Horashchenkov, is choosing the new top NAPC officials.
She also said that the SBU was not investigating the NAPC corruption case at all, claiming that it is not authorized to do so. The SBU did not respond to a request for comment.
The NABU has also investigated NAPC Chief Natalia Korchak for failing to declare a Skoda Octavia A7 car.
