President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was elected in a landslide on the promise of ending nepotism and bringing new people to power.
Yet the former comedic actor’s first appointments showed a preference for trusted friends and business partners.
But the one appointment that is causing the most stir is that of Andriy Bohdan as head of the presidential administration. He worked in the government during ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s four-year tenure and, according to a lustration law passed after the 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution ended Yanukovych’s presidency, he is not allowed to hold top government jobs.
Zelenskiy also made his longtime business partner and friend Serhiy Shefir his first aide. The former director of his Kvartal 95 production company, Ivan Bakanov, became deputy chief of the Security Service of Ukraine. And a few other former employees of Kvartal 95 and Zelenskiy campaign officials were named as advisers to the president and deputies to Bohdan.
Besides his work for exiled ex-Prime Minister Mykola Azarov during the Yanukovych era, Bohdan also served as a lawyer for billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, notorious for many of his business practices — including alleged large-scale bank fraud involving PrivatBank. That scheme led to the bank’s financial collapse and a $5.6-billion taxpayer bailout of the institution, which was nationalized in December 2016.
“Zelenskiy believes that this post has to be occupied by a person from his inner circle whom he trusts,” Bohdan told journalists on May 21, hours before his appointment as chief of staff. He also took credit for talking the actor and television producer into entering politics.
The pair became acquainted about five years ago through a network of mutual contacts. At the time, Bohdan worked as an adviser to Kolomoisky, then governor of southeastern Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. They met when Zelenskiy, who worked on Kolomoisky’s 1+1 television channel, visited the oligarch in the provincial capital of Dnipro.
Zelenskiy’s successful election campaign was haunted by public fears that the candidate would serve as a proxy for the oligarch, who was in conflict with then-President Petro Poroshenko. For two years, Kolomoisky lived in self-imposed exile in Israel and Switzerland. He returned to Ukraine only after Zelenskiy’s victory.
But the voters weren’t dissuaded by the candidate’s reputed ties to Kolomoisky or Bohdan’s status as an influential campaign adviser. They elected Zelenskiy on April 21 with 73 percent of the vote.
Bohdan worked for Kolomoisky on the PrivatBank case, in which the oligarch challenges the nationalization of the bank. Kolomoisky and his business partner Hennady Boholyubov, both of whom have denied wrongdoing, are fighting against the National Bank of Ukraine, claiming that their property had been illegally expropriated.
Bohdan said Kolomoisky was just one of his many clients. On the day after his appointment as head of Zelenskiy’s administration, he gave up his attorney’s license.
“I would not consider Bohdan ‘a puppet for Kolomoisky.’ They are certainly connected, but I would gauge him as a self-sufficient figure with big and independent ambitions,” political expert Volodymyr Fesenko said.
He believes that Bohdan — a person experienced in management and communications — was the most qualified candidate for the job in Zelenskiy’s team.
Patrons and clients
“Bohdan was proactive, didn’t fear authority, bravely took on any case,” recalled Oleksiy Reznikov, partner at the Asters law firm, who was Bohdan’s boss at the start of his career. “He is ambitious. He likes to work in executive power because it means having influence.”
In the early 2000s, Reznikov and his business partners, Igor Pukshyn and Serhiy Vlasenko, had a law firm and hired Bohdan at the request of his father, who used to be their law professor.
Soon, an internship opened for an assistant to a judge of the Kyiv Commercial Court of Appeals. Reznikov recommended Bohdan.
By the time Bohdan finished his stint at the court, Reznikov, Vlasenko, and Pukshyn had parted ways and Bohdan joined Pukshyn’s new law firm as a partner.
During the Orange Revolution, which overturned an election rigged in favor of Viktor Yanukovych, the firm defended his opponent, Viktor Yushchenko. After the uprising, when the Supreme Court ordered that the election be redone, Yushchenko went on to win the second vote on Dec. 26, 2004.
Bohdan was also on a team of attorneys representing ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s government in the scandalous case of the Nikopol ferroalloy plant’s privatization in 2005–2006. It was widely believed that Tymoshenko lobbied in the interest of Kolomoisky’s Privat Group, which was at loggerheads with oligarch Victor Pinchuk’s steel producer, Interpipe, over the plant.
Later, Bohdan provided legal services to then-Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko and briefly served as a volunteer aide to then lawmaker Andriy Portnov.
One more prominent name on Bohdan’s list of clients is his old friend: businessman and ex-politician Hennadiy Korban. Bohdan jumped to Korban’s defense when he was accused of a number of crimes, including organizing a criminal group in 2015. Charges against Korban were dropped in 2017.
A year later, Bohdan defended his college friend, then deputy Prosecutor General Vitaliy Kasko, who was under investigation for fraud. Kasko claimed the charges were retribution for his criticism of his boss, former Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.
Public service
After his former boss, Pukshyn, became deputy head of President Viktor Yushchenko’s administration, Bohdan entered public office in 2007 as deputy justice minister.
Three years later, under Yanukovych’s rule, Bohdan was appointed as an envoy for anti-corruption policy in the notoriously corrupt cabinet of Azarov, Yanukovych’s loyal prime minister.
In an interview with a local Lviv television channel, Bohdan’s father recalled the time when his son called him to tell about his new job in Yanukovych’s government.
“I told him: ‘Do you understand that you fought against Yanukovych in the Supreme Court, and now you want to work in his government?’ ‘Dad,’ he said, ‘there must be (some) honest people (there).’”
This job was meant to be Bohdan’s last in public service. After the 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution that drove Yanukovych from power, the Ukrainian parliament passed a law on lustration, banning top Yanukovych-era government officials from holding any public office for 10 years. Bohdan, the envoy for anti-corruption policy, was supposed to be among those purged.
After Yanukovych fled power, Bohdan resigned and his old friend Korban introduced him to Kolomoisky, who made him an adviser in the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast government he led for a year until 2015. Subsequently, Bohdan was added to Poroshenko’s party list for the 2014 parliamentary election under the so-called “Kolomoisky quota,” when the relations between the two powerbrokers were good.
But Bohdan never made it into parliament. Kolomoisky fell out of Poroshenko’s favor and parliament passed a bill allowing candidates to be excluded from the party list after the election. It was dubbed “Bohdan’s law.” In 2017, the Constitutional Court cancelled it.
Lustration controversy
This year, Bohdan re-emerged as a senior adviser to Zelenskiy’s presidential campaign. And his appointment as chief of staff has stirred public criticism as a clear violation of the lustration law that Bohdan considers o be unfair and unconstitutional.
“Accountability must be personal for particular deeds. You can’t be punished for the fact that you worked,” he said in a May 2 interview with the NewsOne television channel. In a May 21 interview, he said that “thousands of honest people, who have not done anything bad and worked for their country, ended up under the ban.”
Bohdan claimed that his inclusion on the lustration list was revenge by lawmaker Yuriy Derevyanko. As government envoy for anti-corruption policy, he supposedly exposed an embezzlement scheme carried out by Derevyanko.
Furthermore, Bohdan insists that the lustration law does not apply to him because, under another law, the presidential chief of staff and his deputies are not considered civil servants. However, top officials of the justice ministry have refuted this claim. Yehor Sobolyev, co-author of the lustration law, also confirmed that Bohdan has no right to be in charge of the presidential administration.
On May 23, Deputy Justice Minister Serhiy Petukhov announced that the case could be taken to court.
