Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova was appointed in March with a mandate to prosecute serious cases of crime and corruption — something that her supporters claimed her predecessor Ruslan Riaboshapka failed to do.
More than half a year later, Venediktova has not spearheaded a single successful case against a former or incumbent top official implicated in wrongdoing.
Instead, she has blocked corruption investigations against allies of President Volodymyr Zelensky and other top officials and oligarchs.
“Venediktova is blocking all cases,” Vitaly Shabunin, head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center’s executive board, told the Kyiv Post. “She’s destroying the key investigations.”
Meanwhile, Venediktova’s prosecution reform, which ostensibly seeks to oust corrupt and unprofessional prosecutors, has been criticized by her opponents as a meaningless ploy to preserve the corrupt prosecutorial system.
The Prosecutor General’s Office did not respond to requests for comment.
Poroshenko-era graft
Riaboshapka was fired in March amid criticism that he had failed to prosecute the alleged corruption of ex-President Petro Poroshenko and his allies. Venediktova was appointed with a clear mandate to prosecute Poroshenko-era crimes.
However, her results in this field have been meager.
In June the Prosecutor General’s Office charged Poroshenko with abusing his power by appointing Serhiy Semochko as a deputy head of the Foreign Intelligence Service in violation of procedure. The case was lambasted by judicial experts and anti-corruption activists as a publicity stunt, given the insignificant scale of the alleged crime.
Some independent lawyers have also argued that the legal grounds for the charges were not convincing.
Poroshenko has been investigated by the State Investigation Bureau and the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) in more than a dozen criminal cases but he has not been officially charged in any of them, except the Semochko case. In June the Prosecutor General’s Office also closed three cases against Poroshenko.
Meanwhile, no charges have been brought under Venediktova against top Poroshenko allies.
Oleh Bakhmayuk, a banker and an ally of Poroshenko, was charged under Riaboshapka with embezzling Hr 1.2 billion. However, Venediktova’s office closed the case in June and rejected the NABU’s request to extradite him from Austria.
“During her stint in office, Venediktova did her best to destroy this case,” Shabunin wrote in his blog in July.
In response, Venediktova argued that the case had been lawfully closed due to a court decision. In July the High Anti-Corruption Court canceled the closure of the case.
Zelensky allies
The situation with prosecuting the corruption of incumbent top officials has also been bleak.
In March Geo Leros, a lawmaker from Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, published videos that showed Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak’s brother Denys discussing the sale of government jobs.
The Yermak brothers did not deny the authenticity of the videos, but Denys Yermak claimed they were taken out of context. Andriy Yermak also dismissed the accusations and lashed out at Leros, promising to sue him.
In April, the office of Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky, who was a deputy of Venediktova, transferred the corruption case against Denys Yermak from the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) to the police. The move prompted whistleblower Leros to allege that Kholodnytsky was trying to bury the case.
Instead of prosecuting the Yermak brothers, Venediktova’s office authorized the State Investigation Bureau in March to go after Leros by opening a case against him on charges of divulging a state secret.
Venediktova has also tried to block bribery charges against Oleksandr Yurchenko, a lawmaker from Zelensky’s party, claiming there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute him. Later she gave in to public pressure and authorized the charges on Sept. 17.
In July the NABU also applied to Venediktova to open a bribery case against Pavlo Khalimon, another lawmaker from the Servant of the People. Venediktova refused to open a case then, also claiming that there was not enough evidence.
Venediktova agreed to authorize a criminal case against Khalimon only in September, when it was too late to catch Khalimon red-handed.
Vovk case
Another case blocked by Venediktova is the high-profile corruption investigation against Pavlo Vovk, head of the Kyiv District Administrative Court. In July, Venediktova’s deputy Andriy Lyubovych authorized the NABU to charge Vovk and other judges of his court with organized crime, usurpation of power and bribery.
Two sources at the NABU and the Prosecutor General’s Office told the Kyiv Post that Lyubovych was facing pressure from Venediktova for authorizing the charges. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.
Lyubovych was also stripped of oversight over cases into murders of protesters during the 2013–2014 EuroMaidan Revolution and over the State Investigation Bureau in July, according to the sources. He was also deprived of the authority to register criminal cases and was kicked out of the Vovk investigation group, the sources said.
Prosecutors in the Vovk case were threatened with dismissal if they investigated Vovk’s court, one of the sources said.
In September Venediktova fired Lyubovych. The Kyiv Post’s sources say this was her retribution for Lyubovych’s decision to authorize the Vovk case.
Venediktova was dragging her feet for weeks on requesting to suspend Vovk and the other judges, prompting criticism from civil society.
She has also refused to extend the Vovk investigation, have Vovk brought in for interrogation by force due to his refusal to come, conduct further searches in the Vovk case and wiretap him, one of the sources said.
Rotterdam+
In August anti-corruption prosecutors also closed a graft case into the Rotterdam+ pricing formula.
“The case was closed without any grounds, with the prosecutor referring to expert assessments saying that the experts cannot answer questions about the amount of losses,” the Anti-Corruption Action Center said in October.
The scheme benefited, among others, the country’s richest man Rinat Akhmetov’s energy company DTEK. The formula set energy prices based on a coal index in European hubs “plus” the cost of its delivery to Ukraine. This is unreasonable price-setting because only a tiny portion of coal, around 5%, actually came from abroad, according to the NABU.
The NABU applied for resuming the case but Venediktova refused to do so on Oct. 15.
However, the High Anti-Corruption Court ordered prosecutors to renew the Rotterdam+ investigation on Oct. 28.
Venediktova’s reform
Ostensibly, Venediktova has continued a prosecution reform launched by her predecessor Riaboshapka. However, her critics argue the reform was a sham that has changed nothing in the corrupt prosecution service.
Vetting at regional prosecutor’s offices started in February under Riaboshapka and continued under Venediktova. In October, the vetting of prosecutors at district prosecutor’s offices began.
Riaboshapka’s reform also faced criticism but civil society was heavily involved in the vetting of prosecutors under him, and many tainted prosecutors were fired. As a result of Riaboshapka’s vetting, 55.5% of the 1,339 prosecutors at the central branch of the prosecutor general’s office did not pass vetting and lost their jobs.
Under Venediktova, civil society involvement has substantially decreased.
In April she tried to exclude civil society from vetting commissions altogether. Eventually, she agreed to include three prosecutors and three civic activists delegated by international organizations in the commissions.
However, some of Ukraine’s leading civil society watchdogs — like the AutoMaidan, the Anti-Corruption Action Center and StateWatch — are not participating in the vetting process. AutoMaidan said it has not been invited, while the Anti-Corruption Action Center decided not to participate because it does not trust Venediktova.
As a result of Venediktova’s vetting, about 25% of prosecutors were fired from regional prosecutor’s offices.
“The quality (of Venediktova’s reform) is worse than under Riaboshapka,” Kateryna Butko from AutoMaidan told the Kyiv Post. “Under Riaboshapka top prosecutors were fired without any problem, but under Venediktova mostly low-ranking prosecutors are being dismissed.”
Venediktova has also appointed as her deputies some controversial representatives of the old guard criticized by civil society. These include Roman Hovda, Oleksiy Symonenko and Maksym Yakubovsky, who used to be a lawyer for pro-Russian lawmaker Viktor Medvedchuk.
Defects of vetting
Lawyer Artem Kartashov, a member of a vetting commission, lambasted Venediktova’s reform at regional prosecutor’s offices in a Sept. 18 blog post.
“Interviews (with prosecutors) were transformed into a tool for using civil society to legalize current cadres at regional prosecutor’s offices,” he wrote.
Most prosecutors wrote identical answers as part of practical assignments because the answers were leaked online beforehand, he said. Kartashov added that the test questions were primitive and did not confirm any genuine knowledge.
Moreover, vetting commissions had to interview 15 prosecutors per day and had 45 minutes per each, and there was no time at all to assess candidates, Kartashov wrote. He also said that surprisingly some of the civil society representatives voted for dubious prosecutors.
Venediktova also used a loophole in the law allowing her to appoint prosecutors without vetting.
“Everyone believes this to be complete imitation and nonsense,” Sergii Gorbatuk, a former top investigator at the Prosecutor General’s Office, told the Kyiv Post.
Riaboshapka’s legacy
Other defects of Venediktova’s reform stem from the same faults that were present under her predecessor Riaboshapka, according to Gorbatuk and lawyer Vitaly Tytych.
Under Ukrainian law, there are many procedural safeguards that make it difficult to fire prosecutors as part of efforts to protect individual prosecutors’ independence.
Riaboshapka initially claimed he would bypass such safeguards by liquidating the old Prosecutor General’s Office and creating a new entity. Thus, he claimed, the safeguards will not apply to the new entity, and courts will not reinstate fired prosecutors.
However, the Prosecutor General’s Office has not been formally liquidated but has been just renamed, according to the official register. As a result, many tainted prosecutors have already been reinstated by courts.
Both under Riaboshapka and Venediktova, the reform was criticized for a lack of transparency. Specifically, the Prosecutor General’s Office has not published videos of interviews with prosecutors and decisions on why specific prosecutors were fired or kept in office.
Vetting commissions have also failed to study the criminal cases pursued by individual prosecutors during their career. Gorbatuk and Tytych argue that this should have been the main criterion for vetting.
