Almost five months after whistleblowers exposed alleged large-scale corruption at the National Agency for Preventing Corruption, the investigation into it has seen no progress.
The agency, which is tasked with verifying the e-declarations of top officials, denied accusations of corruption.
The Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, which is investigating the NAPC graft case, and the Prosecutor General’s Office did not respond to requests for comment.
Not a single official has been charged, fired or suspended due to the corruption accusations. Instead, it is the whistleblowers who are being punished and fired from the agency.
The discredited and allegedly corrupt agency has so far failed to punish a single top official for violations in their asset declarations. Instead, the agency will target anti-corruption activists, who will be required to file asset declarations by April 1 in what they call a vendetta by the authorities.
NAPC scandal
Hanna Solomatina and Oksana Divnich, top officials from NAPC, said in November that the agency was 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 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.
In November, the NAPC corruption case was transferred on the orders of Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky and Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko from the independent National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine to the presidentially controlled SBU, in what critics, including Solomatina, believe to be an effort to destroy the case.
Whistleblowers punished
As the scandal broke, Solomatina said she had first been forced to resign in October and then had withdrawn her resignation. However, she said she had been illegally fired nonetheless, while the NAPC claims her dismissal was legal.
She disputed her firing, and an administrative court on March 5 decided to take on the case on May 7.
Solomatina also asked the police to open a criminal case into what she believes to be NAPC Chief Natalia Korchak‘s abuse of power by firing her.
The police refused to do so, but in February Kyiv’s Pechersk Court ordered the police to open the case. However, Solomatina says, the court had initially refused to give her the ruling before March 21, and the police initially refused to receive the ruling, and it is not clear if it has complied with the court’s decision.
Two probes were also opened against Divnich in an apparent effort to fire her, and Korchak banned her from accessing NAPC documents. Korchak also drafted a schedule according to which Divnich must be laid off by November, Solomatina said.
Meanwhile, Divnich’s safe with documents has been opened by unknown people in what Solomatina suspects to be a break-in by NAPC’s leadership. NAPC denies the accusations.
NAPC has also opened five probes against another whistleblower at the agency, Vadym Nikolayev, over alleged legal violations, and he got two reprimands before being forced to quit in February.
Five other employees have also had to quit from the department due to what Solomatina believes to be pressure by NAPC’s leadership.
Controversial officials
Meanwhile, officials with controversial backgrounds have held sway at the NAPC.
“They need people who have a criminal background to pull their strings,” Solomatina told the Kyiv Post.
Volodymyr Hoi, former head of Korchak’s group of advisors, and his wife failed to indicate in their e-declarations that they own the Kniga Roku and Viva Print publishing houses. Those assets are indicated as their property in government registers.
Nikolayev initiated a criminal case against Hoi, and it is currently being investigated by the police. Hoi had to quit NAPC after the scandal.
Meanwhile, Oleksandr Pysarenko, the NAPC’s head of the conflict of interest department and acting chief of staff, has consistently failed to notice any conflicts of interests in asset declarations, according to the audit conducted by NAPC whistleblowers.
In 2014 Pysarenko, then acting head of the State Agency for Ecological Investment, found himself at the center of a corruption scandal and was fired after he awarded a Hr 30 million contract to a firm called Intertekhenergo in spite of a competing bid worth Hr 10 million. Intertekhenergo was linked to Yury Ivanyushchenko, a controversial ally of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, and the Svoboda party, according to the Nashi Hroshi investigative reporting project.
Tetiana Shkrebko, a former top official of the NAPC, 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 Nashi Hroshi and published on Jan. 16.
Despite having been convicted for graft, Shkrebko was later appointed as a deputy head of the NAPC’s department for financial and lifestyle monitoring and conducted many asset declaration checks with violations of the law, according to the NAPC audit.
Helping officials, attacking activists
Meanwhile, top officials keep finding ways to evade responsibility for lying in e-declarations.
President Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc, People’s Front and Radical Party have recently submitted a bill to make law enforcers’ asset declarations secret.
On March 12, Poroshenko also proposed introducing a “tax amnesty” for all Ukrainian citizens, allowing them to escape punishment for ill-gotten wealth by paying a certain tax. If this measure affects government officials, it could help them escape penalties for lying in e-declarations and unlawful enrichment.
At the same time, anti-corruption activists will have to file electronic asset declarations identical to those of government officials by April 1. The Verkhovna Rada missed the last deadline for abolishing the requirement on March 22.
There are no equivalents of such declarations for anti-corruption activists in the West.
The government’s critics have accused Poroshenko of using the new regulation to take revenge on civil society. Ukrainian civil society helped push for government officials to file detailed asset declarations in 2016, exposing many politicians and top civil servant’s extravagant wealth.
Ukraine’s civil society groups and Western partners have criticized e-declarations for anti-corruption activists as a potential tool for discreding them and fabricating administrative and criminal cases against them.
In July, NAPC said that any individuals who get funds or provide services as part of anti-corruption programs must file electronic declarations identical to those of government officials. NAPC also said in March that even those who have attended offline or online anti-corruption courses must declare their assets.
