You're reading: Shevchenko: Yatsenyuk should not be Ukraine’s prime minister

Whether he survives as Ukraine's minister of ecology and natural resources or not, Igor Shevchenko wants the world to know his opinion about who is blocking major reforms in Ukraine today: Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

“The prime minister is the biggest brake and obstacle to reforms in this country,” Shevchenko told the Kyiv Post on June 28 during an interview in his office in Kyiv.

Shevchenko this month refused Yatsenyuk’s demand that he resign – what he called the prime minister’s fifth attempt to fire him during his six months in office. He says it is Yatsenyuk who should resign.

“Ukraine deserves a better prime minister than the guy who is doing all these manipulations,” Shevchenko said. “He’s not a reformer. He’s a pseudo-reformer. He’s playing. He’s doing nothing. He blocks appointments of ministers of the presidential team. He is not guided by the public interest and the country’s interest, but by his own interests and the interests of his business partners and political allies.”

Several attempts to reach Yatsenyuk over the last two days were unsuccessful, including through emails, text messages and phone calls to his press secretary, Olga Lappo. The prime minister’s adviser, Danylo Lubkivsky, responded to a text message by referring questions to Lappo.

One of the latest blowouts between Yatsenyuk and Shevchenko took place after Shevchenko publicly protested the appointments of four members of a selection committee to the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption, a graft-fighting institution created to verify the income and asset disclosures of public officials.

“This was the trigger for the prime minister to start this political persecution of me,” Shevchenko said.

Four members chosen by the Cabinet of Ministers, over Shevchenko’s “active abstention,” appeared to have been handpicked by the prime minister or people working for him, not by reputable civic organizations active in fighting corruption, as required by the law, critics say.

Shevchenko said it appears that Yatsenyuk simply wants to control the agency and who it investigates, thereby subverting the anti-corruption fight

He said that Yatsenyuk’s deputy minister of the Cabinet of Ministers, a 600-employee apparatus under the control of the prime minister, didn’t even want to give him the biographical information about the four candidates.

This dispute, however, was just the latest one between Yatsenyuk and Shevchenko.

“Yatsenyuk demanded me to write a letter of resignation four times during meetings of the Cabinet,” Shevchenko said. “I refused.”

One of the requests came during a heated argument over what to tell the public this spring in reporting about the government’s first 100 days in office.

“I said, ‘let’s admit to each other there is no structural reform whatsoever,” Shevchenko said. “Yatsenyuk accused me of humiliating the Cabinet of Ministers structure. He told me to…sign a resignation letter. My answer was: ‘I am expecting a resignation letter from you.’”

Shevchenko said Yatsenyuk runs the government, including the Cabinet of Ministers, in a closed and controlling manner. And, he said, Yatsenyuk is prone to unprofessional conduct and insults people around him. Shevchenko said Yatsenyuk once told Energy Minister Vladimir Demchyshyn to “kiss my ass” at a meeting.

“He wants to control everything and wants his people in all the positions,” Shevchenko said of Yatsenyuk. “He wants to put his people as deputy ministers, chairmen of agencies, deputy chair of agencies. He illegally uses his authority to push us and force us to take ‘his guys.’ I refused all the requests from their team and that’s also one of the reasons for demanding my resignation.”

Since incurring Yatsenyuk’s wrath, Shevchenko said, the prime minister’s allies have been trying “to dig” dirt on him.

They came up with a flight that Shevchenko took on a private jet with member of parliament Oleksandr Onyshchenko from Berlin to Kyiv. They also accused Shevchenko of improperly using his diplomatic passport then. And, they said, he tried to get a friend of Onyshchenko appointed to the State Geological Service, which issues valuable licenses for oil and gas exploration.

Shevchenko acknowledges taking the flight and wrongly using his diplomatic passport. He said that accusations over manipulating the State Geological Service, which he oversees as minister, are ironic considering Yatsenyuk’s attempts to install his own loyalist in the agency’s leadership.

The candidate close to Onyshchenko was someone with experience in the oil and gas sector and Shevchenko’s third candidate to the appointed post in the ministry, he said.

All were refused by Yatsenyuk, he said, with little explanation.

In January, Shevchenko said, the prime minister forced on him the appointment of Mykola Boyarkin as the acting head of the service, officially the State Service of Geology and Mineral Resources. A court cancelled the appointment as illegal, but an appeal is pending and Boyarkin remains on the job. “This guy is doing what he is being told by the Secretariat of the Cabinet of Ministers,” Shevchenko said. “I have no control whatsoever of the geological service.”

He notes that the accusations against him pale in comparison to the large cases of alleged corruption that the government is ignoring.

He said Yatsenyuk and the law enforcement agencies that he controls are going after him for petty reasons “instead of working on big corruption cases” involving Yatsenyuk allies lawmaker Mykola Martynenko, former deputy interior minister Serhiy Chebotar and member of parliament Serhiy Pashynsky.

The key to understanding the dispute, Shevchenko said, is money.

The State Geological Service plays a key role in issuing licenses and permits to companies for exploration and production of oil and gas.

Shevchenko said that he believes Yatsenyuk wants to control the post for the benefit of his close ally, Martynenko, a member of Parliament with the People’s Front faction led by the prime minister.

Shevchenko also said that billionaire Igor Kolomoisky also has an interest in controlling the post. Shevchenko said another reason Yatsenyuk is attacking him is that he moved to cancel licenses of Ukrnafta, the state-run oil company that was controlled by Kolomoisky. The oligarch, seen as backing Yatsenyuk, still hasn’t paid the state Hr 5 billion owed as royalty payments for oil and gas, Shevchenko said.

There’s obviously lots of money to be made in holding licenses and permits issued by the ministry.

“The Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources used to be one of the most corrupt ministries. We broke all these shady schemes in the ministry,” Shevchenko said. “We returned back to the state 22 fields of gas production fields from the Golden Derrick company.”

Golden Derrick was allegedly controlled by Edward Stavytsky, a former minister of ecology and later energy under President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled power on Feb. 22, 2014.

Stavytsky is wanted on charges of embezzlement of public money and faces economic and travel sanctions from the European Union. Part of the scheme, Shevchenko said, involved improperly obtaining licenses from the Ministry of Ecology. “We reclaimed them for the state through a ruling of the court,” he said.

Another Yanukovych-era minister of ecology, Mykola Zlochevsky, is also suspected of massive financial corruption and has presumably fled abroad, despite denying the accusations. About the ministry he inherited from the Yanukovych era, Shevchenko said: “They took bribes for everything. We stopped this. We just fired all these crooks. The first day in the ministry, I fired the deputy minister. I fired all the heads of the agencies, like the geological services agency, the water management services; the ecological inspection service,” Shevchenko said.

Shevchenko alleges that Yatsenyuk wants to control the ministry to issue licenses to benefit his allies.

The minister said his actions to revoke the Yanukovych-era licenses and put them up for transparent auctions has angered people who received the licenses improperly or want to receive them. “Those people are close to the prime minister and this may be another reason to demand my resignation,” Shevchenko said.

He said he’s made progress in other areas, acknowledged by such reform watchdogs as Vox Ukraine.

“I opened all geological data, databases of licenses of gas and oil exploration. Now we are opening the budget of the ministry so people can see how we spend the taxpayer’s budget. We’re putting administrative services online, launching this service as well.”

Shevchenko said that he also eliminated needless regulations that were sources of bribes, such as cancelling inspections of ballast waters from ships at ports.

Unlike many other ministries, which are acknowledged to be overstaffed and underpaid, Shevchenko said that his ministry has just 260 underpaid employees with vast duties — overseeing natural resources, national parks and permits to manage hazardous waste, “where the corruption was very intense.”

Another rap on Shevchenko, a wealthy lawyer who graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School, is that he had no ecological experience.

He said that’s not as important as other qualities. “You should be a good manager, at this point, you need to be a crisis manager,” Shevchenko said.

Shevchenko said that he will clear his name and fight for his job.

But he acknowledges that his fate depends on the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko. He is a supporter of the president. “I will honor the decision of the parliament,” Shevchenko said. “It will be the decision of the president.”

He said that the time has come to blow the whistle on Yatsenyuk’s governing style, which includes trying to railroad Cabinet decisions without giving other ministers needed information in advance. “Sometimes we are voting like blind cats,” he said.

So he finally revolted.

“Now I am paying the price,” he said.

Kyiv Post chief editor Brian Bonner can be reached at [email protected].