Ukraine may take a step forward in its fight against corruption, if parliament approves President Petro Poroshenko’s plan for an independent agency with broad powers.
Long needed to counter what Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk called on Sept. 10 Ukraine’s “biggest internal (national security) threat” through Facebook, it’s also a requirement of Ukraine’s largest lender, the International Monetary Fund.
In the past four years $11 billion was siphoned yearly through the abuse of public procurement tenders alone, Justice Minister Pavlo Petrenko said at a Sept. 9 news conference in Kyiv.
This might change if the bill gets adopted. Called the National Anti-Corruption Bureau in the legislation, the anti-corruption tsar would be competitively chosen having no less than five years of executive management experience, and who for two years wasn’t a political party member. Other personnel clauses include hiring people who in the past five years worked in the capacity of investigating corruption.
The president wants new people to fight graft, said presidential adviser Oleksandr Danylyuk, who led the preparation of the bill. “We don’t need employees that failed in their fight against corruption,” he stated.
To make the agency’s employees less susceptible to bribe-taking, monthly salaries will start at Hr 18,000 – roughly what the president makes – and go as high as Hr 60,900 for the bureau chief.
Special powers include having a team of specially dispatched prosecutors, the authority to exclusively investigate crimes committed by civil servants and government officials or ones related to them. The agency is to publish bi-annual progress reports and give updates to the president, Cabinet of Ministers, and parliament.
Experts at the non-profit Corruption Fighting Center believe the IMF conditionality as part of a $17 billion bailout package is an indicator of the bill’s chances of adoption.
“The Verkhovna Rada has to pass the bill…otherwise it might become a reason for the IMF to stop funding,” said Dariya Kalenyuk, head of the Corruption Fighting Center. Ukraine’s 450-member legislature is expected to vote on the document on Sept. 16.
Smaller army of corruption fighters
The newly established agency would only employ some 700 people and have regional offices. “I’m not sure that today we’ll be able to find enough people to do this work. But when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (in the U.S.) started, they had only 150 people,” said Danylyuk of the presidential administration.
This is very much like what Georgia, a rather small Eastern European state that has been praised for its democratic commitment, did. Reforms led by ex-President Mikhail Saakashvili, who held the office in 2004-2007 and 2008-2013, were focused on dramatically cutting bureaucracy. As a result, the number of public-sector employees dropped by almost 50 percent, while salaries for the rest increased 15-fold, said Alexander Kuparidze, a post-doctoral fellow at Washington D.C.-based Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies.
According to Georgia’s Justice Ministry, roughly 1,000 public officials were convicted of corruption-relation offenses in 2003-2010, a list that included 15 deputy ministers, 31 heads of city councils and six members of parliament.
Improved personal cash flow statements
Stricter control will be introduced for anti-corruption officials, as their personal assets will be closely monitored. Polygraph testing will also be used. The bureau’s work will cost the budget Hr 30 million at most, instead of the billions of hryvnias that is spent now, Viktor Chumak, head of the parliamentary committee on fighting corruption and organized crime, said.
Kyiv Post staff writer Iana Koretska can be reached at [email protected].
