The Verkhovna Rada on March 21 again failed to appoint an auditor of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) backed by President Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc, the People’s Front and former allies of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych.
The appointment of the auditor, Nigel Brown, is seen as an effort by Poroshenko and his allies to restrict the bureau’s independence and potentially fire its chief, Artem Sytnyk. The bureau’s chief can be fired as a result of an audit.
Three NABU auditors are appointed by the president, the Cabinet of Ministers and the Verkhovna Rada. If parliament chooses Brown, all three auditors will be controlled by Poroshenko.
The alleged efforts to restrict the anti-corruption bureau’s independence come as it is prosecuting State Fiscal Service Chief Roman Nasirov, a Poroshenko protégé.
Attempts to impose Brown have been allegedly accompanied with numerous procedural violations, which Poroshenko’s supporters deny.
Parliament on March 21 first voted to choose between two candidates, Brown and Robert Storch, a deputy inspector general of the United States who is seen as independent from Ukrainian authorities. Brown got 202 votes, while Storch received 178 votes.
Subsequently the Verkhovna Rada voted for appointing Brown as a NABU auditor but he received just 200 votes, short of the necessary 226 votes.
Most of the Poroshenko Bloc and the People’s Front, as well as some lawmakers of the Opposition Bloc, Vidrodzhennya and the People’s Will – offshoots of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions – voted for Brown. The Samopomich and Batkyvshchyna parties voted for Storch.
The Chesno civic group said that some of the lawmakers had voted for other members of their factions, which is a violation of the law.
Yegor Sobolev, chairman of the anti-corruption committee, said that the draft decision on the vote for Brown had been falsified since Yury Tymoshenko from the People’s Front, who is identified as one of the signatories, had told him he had not signed it.
The Anti-Corruption Action Center and the Reanimation Package of Reforms on March 21 also recommended several independent candidates for a NABU auditor to be appointed by the Cabinet. These include Martha Boersch, a U.S. attorney who successfully prosecuted ex-Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko; Carlos Castresana Fernandez, a Spanish prosecutor who prosecuted 150 top officials at the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, and Giovanni Kessler, the director-general of the European Anti-Fraud Office.
Parliament’s first attempt to appoint Brown failed on March 16.
Members of the Poroshenko Bloc, the People’s Front, the Opposition Bloc and Vidrodzhennya on March 16 approved both Brown and Storch at a meeting of the anti-corruption committee. The committee’s chairman, Sobolev, believes the meeting to be illegal because committee members had not been notified within 24 hours, as required by the law, and the chairman had not refused to hold a meeting.
One of those voting for the decision, Serhiy Dunayev from the Opposition Bloc, has been accused of having links to Kremlin-backed separatists, which he denies. Former separatist leader Sergei Korsunsky testified last year that Dunayev, the ex-mayor of Lysychansk and a former member of the Party of Regions, had helped militants who seized the Security Service of Ukraine’s headquarters in Luhansk in 2014.
In an effort to create a pro-Poroshenko majority on the committee and appoint Brown, the Verkhovna Rada on March 14 delegated three pro-presidential members to the committee.
Before that, the anti-corruption committee held a competition and unanimously approved Storch as a bureau auditor in December.
Verkhovna Rada Speaker Andriy Parbiy did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Commenting on the alleged procedural violations during the vote for Brown, Serhiy Kaplin, a lawmaker from the Poroshenko Bloc, argued that both the pro-Brown side and anti-Brown lawmakers were often violating the law.
“I don’t believe in principle that one can create an independent auditing body in this country but we must evolve,” Kaplin, who voted for both candidates, told the Kyiv Post.
Andriy Teteruk from the People’s Front, who also voted for both candidates, responded to accusations that his party had voted in unison with former Yanukovych allies.
“Don’t talk to me like that,” he told the Kyiv Post. “This is manipulation. The People’s Front doesn’t hold any coordinated votes with the Opposition Bloc.”
Brown is a little-known and controversial British citizen.
British authorities have investigated Brown on suspicion of bribing a police officer on behalf of a Russian client and buying secret police information.
His company has also provided security services to Russian exiled oligarchs Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky, and received 6 million British pounds from Russian nationals’ offshore firms, according to British newspaper The Times and Radio Liberty.
