A group of government watchdog organizations are crying foul over how four members were chosen to a panel that is supposed to appoint experts to the newly formed National Agency for Prevention of Corruption.
The agency, not part of the government’s National Anticorruption Bureau
of Ukraine, has the mandate to verify the asset declarations of public
servants, manage conflict of interests, as well as other integrity issues.
However, the Cabinet of Ministers allegedly rigged how four of the eight
members of the selection committee were chosen that will appoint the experts,
according to the Anticorruption Action Center. The group says the four are not independent.
Three other groups, the Reanimation Package of Reforms, Transparency
International-Ukraine, and the Center for Political Studies and Analysis, made
similar allegations.
The four committee members were to be chosen from among nongovernmental
organizations with experience in anti-corruption issues. The other four each
were to be appointed by Parliament, the Cabinet, president and the National
Agency on Civil Service.
When the Cabinet convened a meeting on May 17 to choose the non-profit
quota, according to a statement by the Anticorruption Action Center, delegates
from 45 groups, “most of which have no anti-corruption experience, took part in
the voting which appeared to be well orchestrated.”
On June 5 Transparency International-Ukraine filed a lawsuit to revoke
the vote on the four non-profit group members of the selection committee.
The government had also prior to this, amended the law to reduce the
number of selection committee members from eight to a minimum of six.
On June 4, the Cabinet voted to approve a committee of seven members.
While three of them are delegates from various government bodies, excluding
Parliament, four were elected by the allegedly rigged vote in May from among
the non-profit organizations.
“Most of these NGOs are not known to anyone in the circle of
anti-corruption activists,” said Volodymyr Martynenko, an activist with the
Center for Preventing and Fighting Corruption.
The list of the supposedly anti-corruption groups that were allowed into
the voting includes the Association of Interns of Verkhovna Rada, Mortgages for
the Youth Union, Union of College Students of Kyiv, Center for Village Youth
Support, Youth for Rural Revival.
The Kyiv Post tried to contact those organizations to clarify their
involvement with combating corruption, but the phone numbers listed online for
all of them were either disconnected, belonged to private residences, or calls
went unanswered. At least two of the organizations allowed to vote were
registered by the same person at the same address.
“To date, the government’s secretariat failed to provide full access to
the documents submitted by the participating NGOs that could prove that they
indeed had any anti-corruption experience,” according the Anticorruption Action
Center statement.
Now Transparency International-Ukraine and the Anti-Corruption Action
Center are calling for the Cabinet to annul the appointment of the committee
and hold a re-vote. The committee, they say, is fully controlled by the
government, and can’t be trusted.
“Controlling the agency means controlling who gets checked,” said Daria
Kaleniuk, head of the Anticorruption Action Center. “There is an undercover
battle for this tool.”
Yegor Sobolev, an lawmaker with the Samopomich party and head of
Parliament’s Anti-Corruption Committee, thinks the staff of the government
secretariat was merely executing someone’s will to manage the voting process.
“The responsibility is on Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, but I will
not be surprised if President Petro Poroshenko tolerates this plan too,”
Sobolev said. “They share the wish to leave the things as they are.”
Oleksandr Ruzhytskiy, one of the elected committee members, told the
Kyiv Post that he won because the group that nominated him, Lviv EuroMaidan,
had campaigned for him among other voting organizations.
“As it is common at such an election,” he added.
Ruzhytskiy isn’t a member of Lviv Euromaidan. His own experience of
fighting corruption lies, he says, within Transparent Business, a group he
founded in September 2014. The organization is little known. Mentions of it are
found in Ruzhytskiy’s online profiles.
The same low profile is kept by the organization that nominated
Ruzhytskiy, Lviv EuroMaidan.
Ruzhytskiy’s father, former lawmaker Anton Ruzhytskiy, had recently run
for another anti-corruption body, the Anti-Corruption Bureau’s public control
council, but didn’t win. Oleksandr Ruzhytskiy said he urged his father to run
in the election.
“I’m ready for a re-election if something turns out to be wrong with the
voting,” Oleksandr Ruzhytskiy said.
Another committee member, Viktor Shlinchak, is also ready for a
re-election, although he sees no problem with the first vote. Shlinchak, a
journalist and co-owner of news website Glavcom.ua, has been involved with the
World Policy Institute, a think tank that promotes European integration. His
background qualifies him for the anti-corruption agency, he said in a Facebook
post.
So far, the Cabinet of Ministers hasn’t responded to the activists’
accusations and has showed no intention of holding a re-election to the
selection committee. It held its first meeting on June 11.
Kyiv Post editor Olga Rudenko can be reached at [email protected].
