You're reading: Telychenko’s mission: Get rid of ‘mafia’ prosecution

Valentyna Telychenko has the job of fixing what many think is unfixable: The 15,000-member Prosecutor General’s Office that operates more like a mafia protecting top-level corruption than prosecuting it.

The 47-year-old human rights lawyer, best known for her work to bring justice to the 2000 murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze, has accepted the post of deputy prosecutor general in charge of reform under Prosecutor General Yury Lutsenko, who was appointed on May 12.

In this role, she will try to succeed where her predecessor, Davit Sakvarelidze, did not. Sakvarelidze’s reform efforts were sabotaged by Lutsenko’s predecessor, Viktor Shokin, who President Petro Poroshenko grudgingly removed in March after strong and sustained public pressure.

“We need to change so the prosecutor system will no longer be a prosecutor mafia,” Telychenko told the Kyiv Post in a June 10 interview from a prosecutor service conference room, where she was working until she gets her own office. “The reality has not changed yet…We are still very close to the Soviet and post-Soviet realities. As a result, we have a bad situation.”

Her boss, Lutsenko, told members of the European Parliament the same thing in Brussels on June 14. The law enforcement branch he leads has “not changed one iota” since Soviet times, the EU Observer quoted Lutsenko as saying. “The post-Soviet system will be demolished. This must happen in the next year.”

If that is the case, Lutsenko stayed silent and loyal throughout the Shokin debacle as head of the president’s faction in parliament, despite these views.

No trials soon

Anybody expecting a quick fix will be disappointed.

Assuming Telychenko’s work is not obstructed, her task will take years if she succeeds in everything she is setting out to do: Fire hundreds of corrupt or incompetent prosecutors, hire new ones who are paid decent wages, remove investigative functions from the prosecutorial service — in general, create a European-standard service with European laws, which is her aim.

In the meantime, she will have no say over who gets investigated or who gets prosecuted, leaving the task mainly to Shokin-era holdovers that Lutsenko is, controversially, keeping in place for now.

The record of the Prosecutor General’s Office is dismal and the prospect of any trials involving current or former officials for corruption appears to be as remote as ever.

In a nation awash in high-level corruption involving billions of dollars stolen and many murders unsolved, the Prosecutor General’s Office has not solved a single big case since statehood, including in the last 28 months since Viktor Yanukovych fled the presidency at the height of the EuroMaidan Revolution.

Since security cameras caught Yanukovych-era Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka barreling past airport security guards on his way to exile in Russia, where he is a fugitive from corruption charges in Ukraine, the nation has had four presidentially appointed prosecutor generals: Oleh Makhnitsky, Vitaly Yarema, Shokin and now Lutsenko.

‘Criminals’ in charge

It’s a sad situation, Telychenko acknowledged.

“I personally hate Yarema and Makhnitsky more than Shokin. Shokin is just a Soviet guy,” Telychenko said. “But Yarema and Makhnitsky are criminals who stole a lot and made such a bad performance for Ukraine.”

As for Shokin, who Poroshenko appointed in February 2015, she said that he had redeeming qualities. On the plus side, she said, he knows professional standards and brought in qualified people. But it wasn’t enough.

“He is Soviet. He spoke a different level than the public international community speaks,” she said. “He only knows communist bureaucracy language. That is bad. He had to go.”

Many proposals are being pushed for creating a judicial system that will actually bring justice. Some want to create a foreign-led team of anti-corruption police, prosecutors and judges with special legal powers. Others want to smash the current Soviet system and rebuild from scratch.

System salvageable?

But Telychenko said the current prosecution service is salvageable.

“I believe that a third of the prosecutor’s system are those who are valuable for the state. They are knowledgeable. They are skilled and we need them to sometimes investigate, and to proceed with cases in the court. So it is a challenge not to lose them,” she said.

Some criminal cases proceed “properly in court,” Telychenko said, and — if neither side bribes the judges — justice does get dispensed.

Telychenko said she is compiling statistics and analysis to show the status and dispositions of investigations. Also, Lutsenko has given the major heads of his divisions 100 days to report on their progress; she expects the reports in September or October.

Key deputies

Besides Telychenko, other new Lutsenko appointees include Dmytro Storozhuk, elected to parliament in 2014 as a member of ex-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front faction. His appointment is criticized as yet another case of political cronyism.

Other key people include Deputy Prosecutor General Yury Stolyarchuk, a Shokin holdover, who is in charge of investigations. Telychenko said that Stolyarchuk is not as bad as his reputation, which is that of someone who has sabotaged high-profile cases. She said that he is a qualified investigator who stayed out of the prosecutorial service during the highly politicized era of ex-President Leonid Kuchma. Replacing Stolyarchuk will only delay justice further, she argued. “Even if we will get a genius investigator, a genius investigator is not ready to replace Stolyarchuk,” she said. Telychenko in March called for appointing Stolyarchuk as prosecutor general.

Stolyarchuk supervises the anti-corruption department accused of fabricating political cases. Moreover, he has started numerous criminal cases against Sakvarelidze’s subordinates in what his opponents see as an effort to pressure them and protect two top prosecutors — Oleksandr Korniyets and Volodymyr Shapakin — suspected of accepting bribes.

According to video footage of a competition for prosecutors’ jobs, Stolyarchuk questioned the necessity of Sakvarelidze’s reforms to cleanse the prosecutorial system.

Another pivotal figure is Serhiy Horbatyuk, who oversees special investigations such as those into the massacres of more than 100 people during the EuroMaidan Revolution and the May 2, 2014, fire in the Odesa Trade Union Building that killed 42 pro-Russian activists. “Ten months after the fire, there was no investigation at all,” she said.

There are also problems with the investigations into the 2014 murders of EuroMaidan Revolution demonstrators. Horbatyuk, despite having 150 investigators, has managed to bring only five former Berkut special force police officers to trial. “We have a lot of problems with Maidan-related” cases,” she said.

Another key deputy is newly appointed Evgeniy Yenin, a deputy prosecutor general in charge of international cooperation, which is in such bad shape because of the poor reputation of Ukraine’s criminal justice system that many requests for information or assistance go unanswered in foreign jurisdictions.

Maxim Melnychenko, another Shokin loyalist, is the head of the department in charge of investigating other prosecutors suspected of bribery. Melnychenko must be fired under the lustration law, which stipulates dismissing Yanukovych-era officials, but has managed to escape lustration by getting a favorable court ruling.

Lutsenko has not yet lived up to promises to fire officials subject to lustration, who include Melnychenko and Kyiv’s acting chief prosecutor Oleh Valendyuk.

Roman Shkutyak, a war veteran and Poroshenko Bloc lawmaker from Ivano-Frankivsk, is in charge of investigating income and asset declarations of prosecutors.

Anatoly Matios, an ex-top official of Yanukovych’s administration, is the chief military prosecutor.

End to political influence

Telychenko said Lutsenko “doesn’t want political influence on the investigations” and “clearly told investigators and their bosses: no contact with politicians, oligarchs, influential and connected persons.”

She said Lutsenko also disbanded the so-called Kononenko-Hranovsky division of prosecutors who investigated political enemies and are suspected of fabricating criminal cases. The department is effectively run by Ihor Kononenko, a lawmaker and business partner of Poroshenko, and his ally and lawmaker Oleksandr Hranovsky, according to Poroshenko Bloc parliamentarian Sergii Leshchenko.

“That division doesn’t exist anymore,” Telychenko said.

This claim, however, is contradicted by the Prosecutor General’s Office official website.

The unit was initially known as the department for criminal cases in the civil service and property cases. Lutsenko described the department’s work as dubious and unsatisfactory and promised to replace its head Volodymyr Hutsulyak.

He has also called the department’s cases against Sakvarelidze, former reformist Deputy Prosecutor General Vitaly Kasko and anti-corruption activist Vitaly Shabunin “shameful.”

But instead of abolishing the department or firing its leadership, he last week renamed the unit as the department for high-profile economic crimes and appointed Hutsulyak and his controversial deputy Dmytro Sus to run it.

Lutsenko and Telychenko have not criticized prosecutors who cooperated with Hranovsky and Kononenko. Instead, Lutsenko has issued a reprimand for Horbatiuk for talking to reformist lawmaker Leshchenko, and Telychenko has also lambasted Leshchenko.

When asked why Lutsenko didn’t reappoint Sakvarelidze and Kasko, another reformist prosecutor forced out by Shokin, Telychenko dismissed them as politicians.

“As far as I understand, they don’t want to come back,” she said. “They are politicians so don’t blame Lutsenko for not hiring back Kasko or Sakvarelidze.”

Kasko scoffed at accusations that he’s a politician, noting the president is stacking the prosecutor’s service with his political allies, including ex-Poroshenko Bloc leader Lutsenko, Storozhuk and Shkutyak.

“They brought half of the Poroshenko Bloc with them to the Prosecutor General’s Office and are telling fairytales,” he told the Kyiv Post.

Kasko said Lutsenko and other top prosecutors had never offered to reinstate him and Sakvarelidze because in that case “Poroshenko would turn their lives into hell.”

Lutsenko had to close the embezzlement case against Sakvarelidze due to the absence of a crime.

The fraud case against Kasko is being actively investigated by the Interior Ministry and represented by prosecutors in court, while his apartment is still in custody. Many view the case as persecution for his exposure of corruption while he served.

Kasko told the Kyiv Post he believes the Prosecutor General’s Office had given an order to continue the crackdown on him.

In bad shape

Even if Telychenko shapes up the prosecutor’s service, Ukraine’s criminal justice system has other weak points — from poor investigative skills in such law enforcement agencies as the Interior Ministry, with 230,000 employees, and the Security Service of Ukraine, with 27,000 employees.

“Investigation in police is almost collapsed for a number of reasons,” Telychenko said. “There is no investigation really.”

This is why, contrary to Poroshenko’s promises, prosecutors will retain their investigative duties for at least two more years “just to keep Ukraine protected from crime to some extent,” Teleychenko said.

While lawmakers have belatedly launched court reform, Telychenko said justice will remain blocked as long as the nation’s 9.000 judges “are still the same and they still take bribes.”

On brink of ‘catastrophe’

This is Telychenko’s first government post and it may be her last. She got a call on a Sunday night to meet Lutsenko the next day. He cajoled her into taking the position, saying it’s better to try to reform from the inside than criticize from the outside. She listened to his plans. She thinks he’s sincere.

“I know I have some credibility with Lutsenko and Poroshenko,” Telychenko said. “They understand we are too close to a catastrophe. If we do not demonstrate success in cleaning the system, in progress in investigations, if we will not have a good intermediate result to the public, then the next elections will happen soon and Poroshenko will not be re-elected.”

She doesn’t care, however, about politics.

“I am not a politician. I report to the public honestly,” she said. “I am non-partisan forever. There is no honest party in Ukraine.”

If the big cleanup project ahead doesn’t work out and her work is unsuccessful, she said she’ll gladly return to private practice, where there’ll be lots of potential clients. “I will be extremely successful as a human rights protecter,” she said.