The Presidential Administration has so far failed to divulge a list of 2,702 former officials that President Petro Poroshenko says were convicted of corruption over the past year.
Andrei Zhigulin, a spokesman for the Presidential Administration, promised that the list would be sent to the Kyiv Post on June 25. However, the Kyiv Post had not received the list as of 7 p.m. that day.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published on June 10, Poroshenko wrote: “Over the past year, 2,702 former (President Viktor Yanukovych) officials have been convicted of corruption.”
The administration’s department for providing access to public information said on June 22 in an e-mail that the Kyiv Post’s request for a list of the officials, which had been sent on June 17, did not comply with the law on access to public information.
The request has been forwarded to the administration’s chief information policy department, the department for providing access to public information said.
Daryna Kalenyuk, executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, said she had not yet seen the list either.
Experts doubted that so many convictions could have taken place in such a short period.
Kalenyuk said that the Presidential Administration could have counted convictions in cases against petty officials started three or five years ago. The investigations that started following the EuroMaidan Revolution could have hardly led to such a large number of convictions, she argued.
Tetyana Kyrylenko, an expert at the Reanimation Package of Reforms, told the Kyiv Post that they had sent a request to the Presidential Administration on June 25 but had so far received no reply.
She said she knew no officials convicted over the past year.
Victoria Voytsitska, a Samopomich party lawmaker, also said by phone she had never heard of a single court verdict against corrupt officials in that period.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected]
