On April 3, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project published an investigative story about an offshore company registered by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in 2014. The report raised questions about whether his actions violated Ukrainian law and whether the firm is a vehicle to avoid paying millions of dollars in taxes to Ukraine. He denied the charges on April 4.
It was one of the many stories that were published simultaneously by journalists around the globe who have obtained access to the leaked emails of Mossack Fonseca & Co., a Panamanian law firm that specializes in registering offshore companies in tax havens.
In Ukraine, the biggest story was the offshore company of Poroshenko, which he failed to mention in his assets disclosure statement.
While the Poroshenko story made it to the front pages of many Western publications, various Ukrainian media reported it unevenly. Many media outlets covered the story quickly and extensively. Others did not.
Channel Five, Poroshenko’s own TV station that he claims is editorially independent, kept silent about the offshore scandal until 4 p.m. on April 4. When it finally broke its silence, it wasn’t to report the story, but to refute it.
Channel Five published a news story on their website describing the leak and quoting Poroshenko’s consultants who said that neither of the foreign companies mentioned in the OCCRP story hold any assets of president’s company, Roshen.
“The creation of two intermediary companies was a part of corporate reorganization before the future sale of Roshen. However some journalists interpreted it as an attempt to evade taxes,” reads the story.
The story then continued with several Facebook reactions from politicians and experts, putting on the top the posts that defended Poroshenko.
Tetyana Danylenko, the Channel 5 TV host and a popular blogger, wrote on Facebook that Poroshenko did nothing illegal.
“The offshore companies they found aren’t a crime,” she wrote. “And from a moral point of view there aren’t many reasons for disapproval and disappointment.”
Most of the other large Ukrainian media outlets reported the story within the first hours after the publication on April 3, including Novoe Vremya, Korrespondent.net, 1+1 TV channel and its website TSN.ua, Ukrainska Pravda and many others.
Many criticized the way the investigation was presented at Hromadske.TV, a partner of OCCRP in Ukraine.
The journalists of its investigative show Slidstvo.info released a video version of the investigation, where the timeline of Poroshenko establishing an offshore firm was paralleled by the events of Russia’s war in eastern Ukraine.
Special focus was put on the massacre known as the Battle of Ilovaisk in August 2014, which coincided in time with the launch of the registration process for Poroshenko’s new company.
Some thought it was too much.
“The attack against Poroshenko tarnishes not only Ukrainian government but also Ukrainian independent journalism,” Natalya Ligacheva, chief editor of media watchdog website Detector Media, wrote in an op-ed on April 4. “The Ilovaisk parallels are absolutely manipulative.”
Another media expert, Ukraine’s representative in the Reporters Without Borders and head of the Institute of Mass Information, Oksana Romaniuk, partly agreed. She said that the story lacked comments from legal and economic experts and doesn’t explain what the president did wrong, instead featuring a war veteran speaking of the Ilovaisk tragedy.
“The investigative reporting in Ukraine was always very credible. And I’m very disappointed by that highly emotional manipulation of our investigators,” Romaniuk said.
Anna Babinets, one of the authors of the investigation, defended the Ilovaisk parallel in her comment to the Kyiv Post.
“Many Ukrainian fighters have cried for Poroshenko’s help those days (in August 2014),” said Babinets. “They protested near the Presidental Administration. But the president, the supreme commander of the army, didn’t hear them.”
Reacting to the criticism, Hromadske TV said it will discuss the story’s compliance with the editorial standards at an editorial board meeting on April 5.
The Kremlin, however, was not bothered by such debates or ambiguities.
Agence France-Presse quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov accusing the investigative journalists who worked on the leaked Panama Papers of being former U.S. officials and secret service operatives.
“We know this so-called journalist community,” Peskov told journalists in a briefing. “There are a lot of journalists whose main profession is unlikely to be journalism: a lot of former officials from the U.S. Department of State, the CIA and other special services.”
According to the Associated Press, the investigation was published by independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta in Russia, but otherwise the scandal faced an effective coverage ban. Russian television on Monday morning made no mention of it, the news agency said.
Kyiv Post staff writer Veronika Melkozerova can be reached at [email protected]
