A congress of the Bloc of President Petro Poroshenko on March 25 voted for stripping two critical ex-members of the bloc – Mykola Tomenko and Egor Firsov - of parliamentary mandates.
If approved by parliament and the Supreme Administrative Court,
the expulsion of Tomenko and Firsov will be the first-ever implementation of a
constitutional clause allowing parties to expel members who leave their
factions.
The decision on stripping
them of mandates follows large-scale corruption accusations by Firsov against Oleksandr
Hranovsky, a high-ranking Poroshenko Bloc lawmaker, and his key ally Ihor
Kononenko.
Some critics even argue that the decision reflects the
Poroshenko Bloc’s transformation into something worse than disgraced
ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s notoriously corrupt Party of Regions.
“Even the Party of Regions didn’t expel (critical
party member) Taras Chronovol,” Serhiy Leshchenko, another critical lawmaker
from the bloc, told the Kyiv Post.
“The
country is falling apart, international financial organizations are
shocked, corrupt officials are getting more entrenched, there is no
Cabinet, there is no prosecutor general, the hryvnia is plummeting,
and the ruling party is holding a congress to take revenge on two
lawmakers,” Leshchenko wrote on Facebook. “…This is the beginning of the end of
the Poroshenko Bloc as a party. Though, to be honest, this party has
never existed.”
The move also follows the passage by the Verkhovna
Rada of the so-called “party dictatorship” bill, another piece of legislation
that would allow parties to expel critics.
Lyudmila Obertynska, a spokeswoman for the bloc,
responded to the accusations by appealing to the Constitution.
Poroshenko’s spokesman
Sviatoslav Tsegolko did not reply to a request for comment.
Tomenko left the Petro
Poroshenko Bloc last December, while Firsov left in February.
“This can’t be called anything other than repression,” Firsov wrote on
Facebook. “I’m too undesirable for people who currently control the faction. I didn’t
hesitate to speak about Kononenko’s corruption, Hranovsky’s raidership,
managers of corrupt schemes and the corrupt Central Election Commission, where
Yanukovych cronies are still sitting.”
He also said that “some
people who claim to be vehement anti-corruption warriors are not voting for stripping Ihor
Kononenko of the mandate but at the same time on his orders they’re expelling
someone whom (Kononenko) doesn’t like.”
Kononenko faces numerous corruption allegations. Last month Economy Minister Aivaras Abromavicus resigned after accusing him
of graft. His statements are being investigated by the National
Anti-Corruption Bureau.
“I was sure that there are not
only scumbags and criminals in the party but also honest people who can be
persuaded to take action,” Firsov said. “But their number turned out to be very
small.”
Firsov wrote that “corruption penetrates
absolutely everything.”
“The only thing that the
president’s entourage is doing is the creation of corruption schemes and search
for spoils, and the president knows full well about it,” he added.
The expulsion comes after the
publication by Firsov on March 24 of court records from the British Virgin
Islands according to which Hranovsky admitted getting $700,000 in cash. Firsov
wrote that Hranovsky had not included the amount in his income declaration.
The court was considering the
illegal seizure of the Skymall shopping mall in Kyiv. Firsov has repeatedly
accused Hranovsky of involvement in the seizure.
The accusations are also being
investigated by the Prosecutor General’s Office and the National
Anti-Corruption Bureau in Ukraine.
Commenting on the accusations,
Hranovsky has claimed that he was not supposed to declare the amount because he
did not use the cash.
Meanwhile, Tomenko argued that
he was a member of the faction but not the party itself, and therefore it had
no right to expel him from parliament.
Tomenko attributed the bloc’s
decision to its attempts to crack down on “lawmakers who tell the truth.”
In
what critics saw as another victory for corrupt officials, the
Prosecutor General’s Office has started an investigation against the
Anti-Corruption Action Center and has received permission from a
court to search its premises, Vitaly Shabunin, head of the center’s
executive board, wrote on Facebook on March 25.
Leshchenko
wrote that the investigation is being carried out by the
anti-corruption department effectively overseen by Kononenko and
Hranovsky.
See a related opinion piece here.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be
reached at [email protected].
