Hanna Solomatina, a top official of the National Agency for Preventing Corruption (NAPC), on Nov. 14 blew the whistle on her own agency, accusing it of being a political tool of President Petro Poroshenko, and being involved in mass-scale corruption and other crimes.
Some of her accusations were echoed by several ex-NAPC top officials. The NAPC denied the accusations, saying it would file a libel lawsuit against Solomatina.
Solomatina, head of the NAPC’s department for financial and lifestyle monitoring, said at a news briefing that the new electronic assets declaration system, designed to unveil corruption among officials, was being misused by the authorities.
“The electronic declaration system is being used to cover up for officials loyal to the authorities, for crackdowns on dissidents, and for the personal enrichment of the NAPC’s chief and members of the NAPC’s collective leadership,” Solomatina said. “The NAPC is not an independent agency – it is completely controlled by the government.”
She urged NAPC Chief Natalia Korchak to resign and said she had sent documents to back up her claims to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau. The NABU said it had started a criminal case into the accusations.
Solomatina said she had previously sent the documents to the Prosecutor General’s Office but prosecutors had refused to investigate them and sent them back to the NAPC.
She also called on all Western donors to halt any aid to the NAPC because of the misuse of their funds.
Solomatina said she and two other NAPC officials had been summored to the Presidential Administration twice in September, and an administration official said that electronic asset declaration checks must first be considered and authorized by the Presidential Administration.
She did not name the official explicitly but said she meant a person who is running in the competition for the State Investigation Bureau – a veiled reference to Oleksiy Gorashchenkov, first deputy chief of the Presidential Administration’s department for strategic planning and operating support and a member of the commission for choosing NAPC officials.
The Presidential Administration denied the accusations.
Solomatina said she declined the alleged offers.
She also claimed that the results of e-declaration checks “are falsified in the way needed by NAPC’s leadership” by Korchak, and that she “received orders from the NAPC’s chief to check specific lawmakers’ declarations.”
“The NAPC leadership’s members required officials of the department to check the declarations of officials who are not subject to checks at all,” she said. “Apparently this was done for the purpose of political persecution or getting bribes.”
Solomatina also said that the NAPC’s leadership had prevented a special commission from checking the declarations of candidates for Supreme Court jobs during the recent competition in an apparent attempt to cover up for political loyalists.
“The leadership just banned it from accessing the cabinet with documents,” she added.
Poroshenko on Nov. 10 appointed to the Supreme Court 25 judges who have ill-gotten wealth, participated in political cases, made unlawful rulings or are under investigation in graft cases, according to the Public Integrity Council.
Solomatina also accused Korchak of paying illegal monthly bonuses to herself.
Meanwhile, Rouslan Riaboshaka, a former top member of the NAPC’s collective leadership, said on Nov. 14 on Facebook that the Presidential Administration has run the NAPC through Korchak, NAPC Chief of Staff Igor Tkachenko and Oleksandr Pysarenko, the head of the agency’s department for conflicts of interests and other restrictions set by anti-corruption law.
“I can confirm that the Presidential Administration has interfered in the NAPC’s work,” he said.
Riaboshapka quit in June, saying the NAPC had been completely discredited due to its failure to check asset declarations, and called for the re-launch of the agency and the appointment of new leadership.
Tkachenko, who resigned on Oct. 6 due to disagreements with Korchak, denied accusations of being a tool of Poroshenko.
He told the Kyiv Post it had become impossible to work under Korchak.
Tkachenko said top officials of the agency had been blocking the introduction of the automatic system of checking e-declarations. As a result, the “human factor” in declaration checks has a “non-objective” character and leaves room for manipulation, he added.
Ruslan Radetzky, a member of the NAPC’s collective leadership who quit in August, confirmed during the briefing on Nov. 14 that Tkachenko “gave orders to falsify documents on declaration checks.” Tkachenko denied the accusations.
Radetzky also said he was facing criminal cases because he had accused Korchak of unprofessionalism and had been preventing her from committing violations during declaration checks. He said that Korchak had been blocking NAPC meetings to push for decisions that she wanted.
However, Radetzky also accused Solomatina of participating in the NAPC’s alleged violations, which Solomatyna denied.
The NABU is also investigating another corruption case against Korchak. She is accused of failing to declare a Skoda Octavia A7 car.
The NAPC has so far failed to pursue cases against any major bureaucrats or politicians.
The agency has found punishable violations only in several minor officials’ electronic asset declarations, including the mayor of a small city, while claiming that not a single minister or top official had violated the asset declaration law.
The agency’s critics argue that Poroshenko is using the anti-corruption agency to attack his political opponents rather than investigate corruption.
Last year the agency initiated an administrative case against reformist lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko, an opponent of Poroshenko, accusing him of violating the anti-corruption law by purchasing a $281,000 apartment.
The Dzerkalo Tyzhnya newspaper reported then, citing a source at the Presidential Administration, that top NAPC official Radetzky had been instructed by the Presidential Administration to file a report on Leshchenko’s alleged administrative infraction. Radetzky, who denied the accusations, has been frequently meeting with Poroshenko’s Deputy Chief of Staff Oleksiy Filatov and other administration officials, the newspaper reported.
The report on Leshchenko’s alleged violations was prepared by top NAPC official Pysarenko. In February Kyiv’s Pechersk Court found Leshchenko not guilty.
Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center and a critic of the authorities, has also been targeted. She said in February that the NAPC had threatened to question and prosecute her for paying Hr 9,841 ($366) to Leshchenko for giving lectures on fighting corruption.
Also in February, the agency started an investigation against another Poroshenko opponent, former customs official Yulia Marushevska, over an $18 bonus. The investigation was initiated by Security Service of Ukraine Deputy Chief Pavlo Demchyna, a protégé of Poroshenko’s grey cardinals Ihor Kononenko and Oleksandr Hranovsky.
