You're reading: Poroshenko Bloc denies its disobedient member seat on investigative commission

Over a month after the breaking of the Panama Papers scandal, which revealed the ownership of offshore companies by Ukraine’s president Petro Poroshenko and, later, his allies, the Verkhovna Rada is preparing to launch a temporary investigative commission to examine the matter.

Although a vote to set up the
commission has yet to be taken, the pro-presidential Poroshenko Bloc, the
biggest faction in parliament, has already named the five of its lawmakers it
plans to appoint to the commission as soon as it is officially created.
The offered line-up of the
commission generated controversy in the news and social media – not over the
lawmakers named, but over one lawmaker who was not named.
That lawmaker was Sergii
Leshchenko, a member of the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko, and a former
investigative journalist who is famous for his anti-corruption scoops.
Not loyal

Leshchenko says he was denied
a place on the commission because he is too independent of the faction’s
leadership. The faction leaders say he simply didn’t get enough votes.
Lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko speaks at the Kyiv Post CEO Breakfast on Feb. 12.

Lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko speaks at the Kyiv Post CEO Breakfast on Feb. 12. (Volodymyr Petrov)

“I’m not loyal either to the
leadership of the Poroshenko Bloc faction or to the president,” Leshchenko told
the Kyiv Post on May 18. “Therefore, there are no guarantees of my loyalty (if
I am included) on the commission that will pursue, among others, the cases of (President)
Petro Poroshenko and (his political ally Ihor) Kononenko.”
The public discovered that
Poroshenko owns an offshore firm in early April, when the leaked documents of
Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca were published online.

The documents proved that
Poroshenko, who condemned the practice of using offshore firms to channel money
from Ukraine during his presidential campaign in 2014, registered an offshore
holding company for his Roshen confectionery corporation months after being
elected.

A few weeks later, a new
portion of the document revealed that the people in his closest circle of
business and political partners own the offshore firms, too.

Now, the parliament commission
is supposed to investigate these and other shady cases.

However, by dropping a
candidate with experience in investigating corruption and offshores and
choosing the candidates with no such background instead, Poroshenko Bloc raises
a question of whether it really wants an investigation.

According to Leshchenko, “the
faction’s leadership, obviously, needs loyal people there.”

Head of Poroshenko Bloc Ihor
Hryniv told reporters that the faction had considered Leshchenko’s candidacy
for the commission, but he received the least amount of votes. By different
accounts, six or seven lawmakers out of the faction’s 144 members voted for
Leshchenko.

One of them was Mustafa Nayyem,
also a former investigative journalist and a lawmaker with the Poroshenko Bloc.

“I’m certain that no one in the
Poroshenko Bloc, or in parliament, has anywhere as much expertise and
experience in public investigations as Sergii (Leshchenko) does,” Nayem wrote
on his Facebook page on May 16.

Nayyem said the situation
reminded him of how the people who are now in Poroshenko’s faction “loudly
applauded our investigations against (former President Viktor) Yanukovych’s regime
two years ago.”

“But when it came to allowing
us to do a real job, with powers, yesterday’s brave men shyly lowered their
eyes,” Nayyem said in a Facebook post.

Viktor Chumak, an independent
lawmaker formerly with the Poroshenko Bloc, said that the Poroshenko Bloc had
not picked Leshchenko because they were simply “afraid of him.”

“They’re scared that Sergii might
dig deep, due to his particular investigative skills,” Chumak told the Kyiv
Post on May 18. “It would be silly of them to pick a person who is opposed to
the faction.”

Chumak, as well as Leshchenko,
is a member of parliament’s anti-corruption committee. He says he will also try
to get into the special investigative commission.

Leshchenko says that even if
he doesn’t end up on the commission, he will try to visit its meeting to share
his knowledge of the political corruption with the members.

Mutual respect

But Batkivshchyna party
lawmaker Ihor Lutsenko, another member of the parliamentary anti-corruption
committee who is also a possible appointee to the temporary investigative
commission, said Leshchenko’s failure to be nominated to the commission was
more to do with politics than his investigative skills.

“This is a question of his
weight in the faction,” Lutsenko told the Kyiv Post on May 18. “Leshchenko has
conflicts with everyone there. Look: if he’s that competent, why there weren’t enough
people to support him?”

Leshchenko didn’t fully quit
journalism after his election to parliament in 2014. He wrote stories and
opinion pieces that accused the members of his faction of corruption. In 2015,
he reported that head of Poroshenko’s administration Borys Lozhkin was under an
investigation in Austria.

That kind of behavior cost
Leshchenko the support of his faction, according to Lutsenko.

Lutsenko pointed out that other
members of the pro-democratic parliamentary group EuroOptimists that Leshchenko
is a member of — Vladyslav Holub, Pavlo Rizanenko and Oleksiy Mushak — had
been nominated.

“The thing is — there has to
be mutual respect,” Lutsenko said.

The Poroshenko Bloc will have
five representatives in the commission. The smaller factions will have fewer
representatives, in proportion to the number of their seats in the Verkhovna
Rada.

Besides Holub, Rizanenko and
Mushak, Poroshenko’s Bloc picked Mykhaylo Kobtsev and Volodymyr Aryev for the
commission. However, Aryev recused himself after Leshchenko noted that Vitaliy
Kononenko, the father of lawmaker and Poroshenko’s business partner (Ihor)
Kononenko, had worked for Aryev.

Aryev wrote on his Facebook
page that there was no conflict of interest, but he would recuse himself to
avoid there being any suspicion that the commission might be biased.

The other factions have yet to
nominate their representatives, according to Lutsenko.

He said that even though it
had been agreed that the biggest factions would have a majority on the
commission, negotiations on the body are in deadlock at the moment.

“The fact that they announced
the names does not mean that they have made a political decision to vote for
the launch of the commission,” he said.

But Lutsenko, as well as
Chumak, said there is still a possibility that a vote on setting up the
commission might be taken on May 19.

Law missing

Still, the temporary special
commission would not be very effective without being backed up by an additional
law, Lutsenko warned.

Dmytro Dobrodomov, an
independent lawmaker and another member of the parliamentary anti-corruption
committee, agreed.

“Without a law on the special
commission, launching such a commission would mean zilch,” Dobrodomov told the
Kyiv Post on May 18.

He said that while Ukraine’s
Constitution allows lawmakers to create such a body, there is no law that would
regulate how it should function and which legal instruments it could use.

“Without such a law, the
commission will just have an advisory nature, mostly in the political area,”
Dobrodomov said.

Nevertheless, Dobrodomov is
also seeking appointment to the commission, which he said would at least make
some difference.

“If they’d wanted the commission
to be effective, they’d have included Leshchenko, myself, and Chumak. But there
are games being played,” Dobrodomov said. “There will be a lot of loud
political statements, but I seriously doubt that there will be any real consequences.”

Kyiv Post staff writer Alyona
Zhuk can be reached at [email protected].