Speaking at a Cabinet meeting on Oct. 21, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk demanded shift changes in the state fiscal and customs services and far-reaching changes to the court system.
Yatsenyuk ordered the fiscal service to cleanse its ranks of officials holding top positions from 2010-14 under ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled power on Feb. 22, 2014, amid the EuroMaidan Revolution. This means some 42 percent of the senior staff has to go, Yatsenyuk said.
The government also announced a sweeping court reform in where judges would beselected on a competitive based in a testing and vetting process much like theone used for the recently created patrol police force.
The future court system would be streamlined, featuring three levels – local, appellate and high court, Yatsenyuk said, cancelling the current four-level system with its specialized courts. He also promised that the reform was to cancel all political influence on the judiciary.
Reform of the court system is lagging, while police and prosecutorial reforms are showing slightly more progress.
Critics believe that even if crimes were to get investigated and perpetrators charged it would be in vain if the courts were corrupt or politically influenced.
Acknowledging the issue, Yatsenyuk at the televised Cabinet meeting stated that “the courts have to pursue justice in the name of Ukraine, rather than in the name of American dollars.”
Corruption in the tax and customs agencies is also widespread, depriving the state coffers of billions of hryvnias in much-needed revenue.
Customs service corruption had even sabotaged a plan to finance repairs of potholedhighways with extra custom revenues generated from corruption crackdown. The non-traditional financing scheme was the idea of the Odesa Oblast Governor Mikheil Saakashvili.
But the envisaged increase in customs revenues had failed to emerge as importers simply shifted custom processing to other regional custom service offices less affected by the fight against corruption.
The head of government had responded by asking the Ministry of Justice to apply a law to cleanse the fiscal service. The review of senior fiscal service staff showed that 76 out of 344 top officials were to vacate their positions immediately in accordance with the law, Tetyana Kozachenko, director of the Minister of Justice’s Department for Lustration, told the Kyiv Post.
With corruption an endemic element of public administration in the country, the likelihood of senior officials being complicit of wrongdoing is high, Kozachenko explained.
Out of 344 reviewed top officials, 88 were working in the national fiscal service, and 36 of them – or 42 percent – had held senior positions for more than a yeari n the 2010-14 period, barring them from holding public office under the lustration law.
A further 40 out of 254 top fiscal service officials in regional offices also fell under the law. “Most them should have been laid off a year ago,” Kozachenko said.
The cleansing was, however, met with particular fierce resistance in the Interior Ministry, the Prosecutor General’s Office and the state tax agency – all government bodies which attempted to seal themselves off from outside demands for change.
Ouster of corrupt officials had been a key demand of the 2013-14 Euromaidan Revolution and “many would have liked a much more fundamental overhaul” of the public administration, Kozachenko said.
Speaking at the Cabinet meeting, Yastenyuk also demanded reform of the Constitutional Court, which had allowed Yanukovych to take control over the other pillars ofpower during his presidency. It wouldhowever take a law amendment to have the cleansing law extended to the judges in Constitutional Court, Oleksandra Drik, head of the Public Lustration Committee civic group, said.
Kyiv Post staff writer Johannes Wamberg Andersen can be reached at [email protected]
