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As a lawmaker with President Petro Poroshenko’s faction, Yegor Firsov was never afraid to speak up when he disagreed with his colleagues or to expose corruption wherever he saw it.

He quit the parliament’s biggest faction as his influence in it waned. He planned to keep working in parliament as an independent lawmaker, but wasn’t given the option.

Firsov and Mykola Tomenko, another former member of the Poroshenko Bloc, were expelled from parliament by the Central Election Commission on March 28.

It was the first-ever case of lawmakers being expelled from parliament because they had left their faction. It sets a worrying precedent, to say the least.

Firsov and Tomenko argue that the decision was illegal for many reasons and amounted to political revenge for their accusations that Poroshenko allies, Ihor Kononenko and Oleksandr Hranovsky among them, are corrupt. Kononenko and Hranovsky deny the accusations.

“They want to turn parliament into an appendix of the chocolate empire,” Tomenko told the Kyiv Post, referring to Poroshenko’s thriving confectionary business.

‘Political vendetta’

According to Natalia Novak, a Poroshenko Bloc member, only about 50 of 135 bloc members were present at the party congress on March 25, and thus it lacked a quorum to expel Firsov and Tomenko from parliament.

“This is nothing but a political vendetta,” Novak said at a news briefing on March 29.

The constitutional clause cited to expel Firsov and Tomenko is also questionable, according to other lawmakers.

Mustafa Nayyem, a member of the Poroshenko faction, criticized the move, saying that the Constitution stipulates that there should be a law under which lawmakers can be expelled. However, no such law has ever been passed.

But Yuliya Kyrychenko, an expert on constitutional law with the Center for Political and Legal Reforms, said that the constitutional clause itself was enough. All the same, she said she still considers the expulsion of Firsov and Tomenko unacceptable.

She said the Venice Commission, a Council of Europe advisory body, has repeatedly criticized this clause as being at odds with Western democratic standards. The commission has demanded that it be removed from the Constitution, she said.

What is more, right before the vote to expel Firsov and Tomenko on March 25, the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko Bloc amended its own charter to allow itself to use this constitutional clause.

According to Kyrychenko, the vote was illegal because such changes can come into effect only after they are registered by the Justice Ministry, “which, obviously, was not possible to do in just one hour.”

Firsov’s proponents also argue that expelling a lawmaker without a court ruling and a Verkhovna Rada vote is illegal. The two lawmakers’ expulsions contrast with that of Mykola Martynenko, a lawmaker whose ouster in December following corruption accusations was authorized by the Verkhovna Rada.

The legitimacy of the Central Election Commission, which approved the lawmakers’ expulsion on March 28, has also been questioned, as the authority of 12 of its 15 members expired in 2014. The commission has denied the claim, saying that a law passed by parliament allows the members to stay on the commission until they are replaced.

The speed with which the commission reacted, compared to other cases, also raised eyebrows.
Lawmaker Ihor Yeremeiev died last August. The CEC is yet to schedule an early election in Yeremeiev’s single-mandate constituency.

Stifling critics

Neither Firsov nor Tomenko have received official confirmation from the Poroshenko Bloc that they have been expelled, which prevents them from pursuing legal action.

However, they don’t plan to give up, saying they will go as far as the European Court of Human Rights to dispute their expulsion.

Tomenko and Firsov say their expulsion was political revenge for criticizing Poroshenko and his allies.
According to Tomenko, the move was intended to show that “if you try playing smart like Tomenko did, we will strip you of your mandate too.”

Tomenko left the Poroshenko faction on Dec. 25 after the Verkhovna Rada passed the 2016 budget that he disagreed with. He also criticized many legislative initiatives by the ruling coalition.

Firsov left the faction on Feb. 8, saying he wanted nothing to do with corruption inside the bloc.

He has lashed out at Poroshenko for appointing allies of ousted ex-President Viktor Yanukovych as regional governors. He also repeatedly accused Kononenko and Hranovsky of large-scale corruption.

On March 24, Firsov published court records from the British Virgin Islands according to which Hranovsky admitted obtaining $700,000 in cash. Firsov wrote that Hranovsky had not included the amount in his income declaration.

The court was holding hearings on the case of the illegal seizure of the Skymall shopping mall in Kyiv. Firsov has accused Hranovsky of involvement in the seizure, which he denies.

At some point, Firsov says, he felt politically helpless.

“I argued, I talked, I made announcements, and I addressed mass media. What else could I do? The only thing left was to start a fight,” he told the Kyiv Post.

He calls his expulsion from the Verkhovna Rada “nonsense.”

“On the one hand they wanted to shut me up. On the other, they wanted to stop the faction from falling apart,” he says. “Now a lot of people will think twice before leaving it.”

The places of Firsov and Tomenko in the bloc were immediately taken by the next two lawmakers on the party list, Oleksandr Bryhynets and Dmytro Belotserkovets. They took an oath in parliament on March 29.

After he left the faction, other parties invited Firsov to join them. However, he rejected all offers.
He plans to come back to politics in the future, but says it’s too early to decide which political force he will choose to be with.

He said that even if the Poroshenko faction and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s 81-member People’s Front agree on a candidate for prime minister, this parliament will not survive until the end of its official term.

“It’s reached a dead end,” Firsov said. “It’s a parliament of lost opportunities. Too many bad sides of the biggest parties have been exposed… But do we need to force it to keep working? Yes. Through civil society’s initiatives, rallies, meetings. And I’ll be there.”

He said the next parliament could be more effective and more independent, but only if people support their favorite candidates not just with votes, but also financially.

“There are some (promising) parties like Democratic Alliance and the People’s Force, they are rising stars,” Firsov said. “They lack ideology and leadership, but they have a chance to ripen.”

Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov contributed to this story.