The Cabinet has voted for the appointment of Ruslan Riaboshapka and Ruslan Radetsky as members of the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption.
This issue was put on voting at an extraordinary sitting of the Cabinet chaired by Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk on Wednesday. Both Riaboshapka and Radetsky received the necessary majority of votes, including from the prime minister.
Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and Sports Minister Ihor Zhdanov opposed the appointment of Riaboshapka. Avakov stressed that his decision was a matter of principle. “I don’t think many know. This story drags on for a long time, over a year now. Riaboshapka and I know each other from work of the previous government. There had been quite a serious scandal, a conflict at the Justice Ministry,” Avakov explained.
Sports minister said he went against Riaboshapk because he is wary of appointing former officials under (disgraced former Prime Minister Mykola) Azarov to the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption.
Ukraine’s Justice Minister Pavlo Petrenko said his ministry removed all the conflicting issues from the agenda in the view of visa-free prospects for Ukraine that required the election of members for the Agency to start functioning.
As reported earlier, the qualification commission to elect members of the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption at a sitting on Wednesday reached a consensus and elected two more members of the Agency, thus providing for the start of its activities.
Riaboshapka and Radetsky each received support of seven tender commission representatives, hence passing the minimum requirement of six votes to be elected.
Riaboshapka is a Ukrainian lawyer. He headed the Anti-Corruption Policy Analysis Department in the Ukrainian branch of Transparency International. Since March 19, 2014, he has served as deputy to Ukraine’s Justice Minister.
Radetsky is also a lawyer, who became known due to Vradiyivka case, when three men, two of them – law enforcement officers, had beaten and raped a resident of the village of Vradiyivka Iryna Krashkova. Due to Radetsky’s work as a defender of the victim, all the accused in the case were sentenced to various terms in prison. Radetsky also worked in the National Security and Defense Council, was a deputy prosecutor of one of Kyiv’s districts, and a member of Kyiv’s mayor Vitaliy Klitschko’s UDAR party.
