Ukraine and its Western partners have reached the Viktor Shokin moment again with the Office of the General Prosecutor.
Shokin was the obstructionist prosecutor general under President Petro Poroshenko, who thought of criminal justice reform as a public relations ploy to placate the West during his 2014–2019 rule. But Shokin actually served a useful role for the president of protecting the status quo, including the oligarchy, as well as harassing political enemies and shaking down businesses. When the heat got too high for Poroshenko, he ditched Shokin in 2016. But the ever-cynical Poroshenko installed the bumbling, incompetent, non-lawyer Yuriy Lutsenko in Shokin’s place.
Lutsenko again served a useful purpose for the corrupt elite: His presence reassured bank owners whose fraud cost $20 billion to taxpayers that they would face no criminal charges. He made sure that ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s gang, which stole $40 billion and killed 100 demonstrators, had nothing to fear. He allowed pro-Kremlin politicians to regain power and influence.
That’s history. But the misery that President Volodymyr Zelensky is inflicting on the nation today is inexcusable. It would be justified to call for the firing of Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova. But she is just the latest in a long line of obstructionist-by-design prosecutors — useless to delivering justice, but useful to keeping the corrupt status quo in place.
The Kyiv Post has heard out Venediktova and has given her ample space in the Nov. 27 print edition to make her own case in an op-ed after she refused repeated requests for an on-the-record interview.
She’s done nothing to move forward the big cases of the past — such as criminal responsibility for the $5.6 billion PrivatBank fraud. She refused to authorize an extradition request for Oleg Bakhmatyuk, an exiled Ukrainian mogul wanted for embezzlement and money laundering. Her office has killed the investigation into the Rotterdam+ coal-pricing scheme, in which
investigators allege that Ukraine paid $1.4 billion more than needed.
She seems either incapable or uninterested in stopping corruption at the Constitutional Court or Pavlo Vovk’s powerful Kyiv District Administrative Court. And most recently, she stands accused of sabotaging the investigation into Zelensky’s deputy chief of staff Oleg Tatarov, who was under investigation for alleged financial crimes by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine — an agency that he wants to abolish. Tatarav had a terrible reputation going into the appointment, for justifying violence against EuroMaidan Revolution demonstrators in 2014. Venediktova abruptly pulled off four prosecutors working on the case, scuttling a planned Dec. 2 arrest.
Zelensky is to blame. It just looks like he’s covering up for his own — just the way he attacked credible allegations that the brother of his chief of staff Andriy Yermak was selling state positions to the highest bidders.
Bottom line: Venediktova is a law school professor out of her element in delivering criminal justice and overseeing 10,000 prosecutors. She’s outmatched by Ukraine’s criminal elite. With her, expect no successful criminal prosecutions of any consequence in Ukraine.
The best that can be hoped for is that Veneditkova will not follow her predecessors by siccing prosecutors on politically motivated cases against enemies or on business shake-down cases.
If it is not already, it should be clearer than ever that the “new” anti-corruption agencies that came into existence after Yanukovych’s overthrow — and now under attack — were a sop from a nation whose leaders have no intention of reforming the existing police, prosecutors or courts.
