Senior officials in Ukraine’s SBU security service have declassified their annual declarations of incomes and properties for the first time under new legislation, and it’s already revealing violations of the law.
Among the issues detected by journalists and anti-corruption activists, officials have failed to appropriately declare sources of revenue and their ownership of private companies.
Since 2016, asset reports from SBU officials had been classified, despite the agency’s history of endemic corruption. The authorities have always explained this secrecy as aimed at ensuring the protection of the SBU’s personnel.
Then, in 2019, President Volodymyr Zelensky signed an anti-corruption law that ruled to declassify SBU declarations. Eventually, in early April 2020, the agency ceased to hide its declarations from the general public.
Now, the violations are coming out. In late May, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s investigative journalism unit Schemes discovered that current SBU Chief Ivan Bakanov had failed to declare his position as director of Nueva Tierra Verde Sociedad Limitada, a private company in Spain, in his 2019 declaration. The firm had been solely administered by Bakanov since 2015, Schemes reported.
According to Ukrainian legislation, government officials are directly forbidden from doing business.
As a response to the allegations, Bakanov claimed he had suspended the Spanish company in 2019 upon his appointment as the SBU chief and promised to find out why it was not eliminated by the Spanish authorities.
The declaration of Ihor Kononenko, the former SBU deputy chief, also included assets purchased with funds of questionable origins.
In his 2019 properties report, the former senior official declared the usage of a parking space in Kyiv, which, according to estimates by the Nashi Groshi investigative journalism project, could cost nearly $40,000.
According to the declaration, the parking spot belongs to Kononenko’s mother-in-law Nadiya Vozniuk, who Nashi Groshi reported lives in Khmelnytsky Oblast and does not possess a vehicle. Moreover, the parking lot is located in an apartment block in downtown Kyiv where Kononenko privatized his service flat, worth nearly $6 million, the journalists discovered.
Kononenko explained that the parking space belongs to his mother-in-law, who purchased it for him with money earned by her own children. The declaration notes that Kononenko’s wife Olena received a loan worth $42,000 (which corresponds to the sum probably paid for the parking spot) from a person named Serhiy Vozniuk, who is supposedly her brother.
Apart from that, the official declared having inherited an apartment in the city of Cherkasy and three land plots in Cherkasy and Kirovohrad oblasts. Following his dismissal from the SBU in early June 2019, he also purchased a BMW X5 car for $940,000.
Kononenko has served as an SBU serviceperson for the entirety of his career since 1999.
Another former deputy SBU chief, Pavlo Demchyna, who has been involved in several corruption scandals in the past years, failed to mention any of his three underage children in his declaration, a direct violation of Ukraine’s legislation.
The former official declared possessing an apartment outside of Kyiv, purchased in late 2016; a Land Rover Discovery car; $59,000 in hard cash and Hr 1.5 million ($56,000) received in monthly payments at the SBU in 2019.
Additionally, he also got Hr 1.25 million ($46,000), supposedly for selling his Range Rover Sport vehicle.
According to the Ukrainska Pravda media outlet, the value of his assets declared as purchased in 2016 greatly surpasses Kononenko’s official total annual income. The apartment alone costs Hr 840,500 ($31,000), while in 2015 he declared his annual income at Hr 215,400 ($8,000).
Moreover, the purchased apartment is located close to a house where Demchyna’s children live with their mother, Olha Volovchuk.
Demchyna also failed to mention her and assets used by her, and he claims to have cut all ties with her in 2012. However, according to an investigation by the Slidstvo.Info journalism project, Volovchuk owned one more house and four vehicles in 2017, despite the fact that, according to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), she earned only Hr 164,000 ($6,000) between 1998 and 2016.
Additionally, according to a NABU investigation, Demchyna purchased his apartment just four months after Volovchuk moved to their house with their children.
Demchyna denies all ties with Volovchuk and any assets owned by her.
A criminal investigation into Demchyna was automatically cancelled after the country’s Constitutional Court in February 2019 ruled legislation against illicit enrichment unconstitutional.
Demchyna resigned from his post in May 2019 and was eventually discharged from the service by President Zelensky.
