Presidential candidates Petro Poroshenko and Sergiy Tigipko spent the most on their campaigns, which is not a surprise since both report multimillion-hryvnia incomes. While the law does not oblige the candidates to report these figures, declaring them is still seen as a test of the candidate's transparency.
A May 21 poll conducted by
Democratic Initiatives Fund revealed the 84.4 percent of respondents believe
that fill disclosure of campaign financing was either “very important” or
“generally important.”
Poroshenko, the confectionery mogul,
paid $7.3 million to help make sure his lead in the public opinion polls gets
realized in the May 25 election results. Money came from personal sources for the billionaire, even though his declaration to the Central Election Commission reads that he
only earned $4.3 million.
Batkivshchyna’s Yulia Tymoshenko, the second leading candidate in the polls and Poroshenko’s main rival, is claiming that
her party ponied up 80 percent of the $3.4 million she has spent on her
election bid, with the remainder coming from 181 donors, although she has not
disclosed the names.
Tigipko, the third most popular
candidate who was expelled from the Party of Regions, paid $5.7 million from his own pocket to beat Poroshenko and Tyhmoshenko,
according to Chesno election watchdog. He has promised to give a full account after
the election.
Of the top candidates, only two have
taken the classic Western approach of soliciting independent donors, and both
are the most transparent about their funding. Former defence minister Anatoliy
Hrytsenko and EuroMaidan activist Olha Bohomolets have published their election
expenses and the names of those who donated to their campaigns on their
personal websites. Respectively, they have spent $683,000 and $1.2 million,
placing them in fourth and fifth place by campaign expenditure, according to
Chesno.
Political parties are sponsoring a
number of candidates, including Oleh Tyahnybok (Svoboda), Mykhailo Dobkin
(Party of Regions), and Dmytro Yarosh (Right Sector). All these candidates have
publicly claimed that their respective parties are footing the bill, although
Yarosh has said that small and medium businesses contributed a little.
Some candidates have revealed more
modest and, let’s say ‘original’, means of sourcing their presidential
ambitions. Kyiv businessman Volodymyr Saranov declared that he is using money received
from the sale of a one-bedroom apartment worth $210,000. Kharkiv native Andriy Hrynenko
stated that his wife is his main sponsor, while former counter-intelligence
chief Mykola Malomuzh said that not only did his relatives put up some cash, he
also had to sell his apartment and house.
To compare, for the 2012 U.S.
presidential election Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, the two leading candidates,
together raised over $2 billion and spent almost $2 billion, according to The
New York Times.
Declaring funding sources is only
half the equation. Saying where the money goes is the other. So far, only the
donor-reliant Bohomolets and Hrytsenko have revealed the counterparties who
distributed their campaign war chests. Even so, “we can be certain that about
80 percent of the main candidates’ expense certainly went towards television
advertising,” calculates Svitlana Zalishchuk of the NGO Tsentr UA.
The law governing presidential
elections in Ukraine demands that candidates declare their incomes, but it does
not oblige them to show who and how much is contributing to their campaigns.
The law only states that all candidates must be given equal access to the media
and that the prices for media space are the same for everyone.
Both leading candidates Poroshenko
and Tymoshenko have said they support introducing rules that would ensure
campaign financing transparency. “We no longer have a government that we need
to be afraid of, and so I say: reveal the sources of funding,” Poroshenko
declared at a campaign rally in Zhytomyr on April 12. Tymoshenko, meanwhile, in
a response to anticorruption watchdog Chesno’s request for information, said, “I
welcome the initiative of social activists, and I think that cleaning the
Augean stables of Ukrainian politics must begin with clean election funds.”
In fact, none of the candidates
oppose initiatives to open election campaign funding sources, yet very few MPs
voted for the May 20 transparency bill. Of the major candidates, only
Poroshenko and Hrytsenko were in the session hall to vote and supported the
initiative.
Kyiv
Post business journalist Evan Ostryzniuk can be reached at [email protected]
