The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on Oct. 2 approved in the second reading a bill that seeks to replace the leadership of the dysfunctional National Agency for Preventing Corruption (NAPC) with the help of foreign experts.
The move would effectively re-launch the agency. To become law, it must be signed by the president.
Civic activists, legal experts and foreign donors have demanded for years that the agency be re-launched.
The NAPC, which is tasked with checking the asset declarations of officials, has failed to punish anyone of significance since it was set up in 2015 and has been accused of corruption and sabotage. The agency has denied the accusations.
The law will come into effect the next day after it is published. When the law comes into effect, the authority of the agency’s current leadership will expire immediately.
Under the bill, the agency will have only one chief appointed by the Cabinet. Currently, the NAPC has a collective leadership, including a chairperson and four other top executives.
The chief of the agency will be selected by a commission that comprises three people appointed by the Cabinet and three people nominated by Ukraine’s foreign donors.
Accusations of corruption, sabotage
Hanna Solomatina, a whistleblower at the NAPC, said in 2017 that the agency was involved in large-scale corruption and was completely controlled by the Presidential Administration. The NAPC and the Presidential Administration denied the accusations.
Solomatina published what she says is correspondence in which Oleksiy Horashchenkov, a Presidential Administration official, tries to give her orders. In 2018, Horashchenkov was fired from the Presidential Administration.
A criminal case was opened into the accusations but no NAPC officials have been charged, fired or suspended so far.
In 2017, the NAPC corruption case was transferred on the orders of Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky and then Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko from the independent National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) to the presidentially controlled Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), in what critics, including Solomatina, believe to be an effort to destroy the case.
In 2018 NABU also drafted charges for Natalia Korchak, former head of the agency and currently a top official there, accusing her of failing to declare a Skoda Octavia A7 car. However, the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office refused to authorize the charges.
According to audio recordings of Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Kholodnytsky published by the NABU, he refused to authorize a search warrant for Korchak, and the search warrant request was returned to NABU.
“Fuck them! Don’t they have any other cases, and they’re playing with Korchak?” he told a prosecutor involved in the case.
Kholodnytsky has confirmed the authenticity of the recordings but said they were “taken out of context.”
At the same time, civic activists and Western donors have demanded that the NAPC launch automatic checks of asset declarations but the agency has failed to do so for years.
Currently, e-declarations are checked manually, which thwarts the process and makes it much more difficult.
