But linking Kyiv Post publisher Mohammad Zahoor with ex-Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin is like tying me in with all of them because all of us have bank accounts. Mine, I can assure you, has a lot less money in it than any of them and I don’t have any companies anywhere in the world.
But these four men — Zahoor, Poroshenko, Lazarenko and Putin — are lumped together in the coverage of some news outlets, including Ukrainska Pravda, photographically and with stories.
It makes me think that nobody is bothering to read the stories. They are just looking at the pictures, the headlines and reacting according to their political biases.
To wit: Australian and United Kingdom authorities are launching investigations based on the documents leaked involving 800 individuals, yet Ukraine’s prosecutors have already concluded that there is nothing to investigate.
To wit: Some think that Poroshenko is innocent of any wrongdoing while others have jumped to the conclusion that he is guilty.
The only relevant questions from the Panama Papers’ leak are: Did anybody act illegally or unethically? Did anybody illegally evade taxes or merely legally avoid them?
These are the questions that Kyiv Post staff journalists are trying to answer, in light of the international investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a Kyiv Post partner, and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists based on leaks of a trove of documents from the Mossack Fonseca firm.
The answers are difficult, when it comes to Poroshenko, who is not helping to clarify anything with his statement today, besides taking a swipe at his four predecessors in office:
“I believe I might be the first top office official in Ukraine who treats declaring of assets, paying taxes and conflict of interest issues profoundly and seriously, in full compliance with the Ukrainian and international private law. Having become a president, I am not participating in management of my assets, having delegated this responsibility to the respective consulting and law firms. I expect that they will provide all necessary details to the Ukrainian and international media.”
His law firm, Avellum Partners, denied accusations of tax evasion. “The creation of a foreign structure does not affect the tax liabilities of the Roshen group in Ukraine, which continues to pay taxes. Any allegations of tax evasion are groundless,” the firm said in an emailed statement.
We are still doing the reporting.
Some lawyers are telling us that Poroshenko definitely acted illegally because he needed to have a National Bank of Ukraine license to register an offshore firm and that he didn’t list the offshore firm, Prime Asset Partners, Ltd., on either his 2014 or 2015 declarations.
Others say that because his offshore registration took place while Russian soldiers were slaughtering Ukrainian soldiers in Ilovaisk, he put his self-interests ahead of national interests.
But it seems clear enough that Poroshenko would be above any of these questions if he had kept his election campaign promise in 2014 to sell his confectionery business Roshen if won the May 25, 2014, presidential election, which he did by a landslide.
“If I am elected, I will be honest and sell the Roshen concern. As president, I want to take care and I will take care only about the welfare of the state,” Poroshenko said in an interview with the German newspaper Bild.
Nobody forced him to make such a declaration. He did it on his own.
The key finding in the investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a Kyiv Post partner, is this:
“…actions by his financial advisers and Poroshenko himself, who is worth an estimated $858 million, make it appear that the candy magnate was more concerned about his own welfare than his country’s – going so far as to arguably violate the law twice, misrepresent information and deprive his country of badly needed tax dollars during a time of war.”
Do I know that he violated the law twice?
I don’t know that.
Do I know that he deprived his country of possibly millions of dollars in badly needed tax dollars during a time of war?
I don’t know that either.
He may have done everything legally and morally.
But the story raises legitimate questions that the president of a democracy should answer.
While people should suspend their judgment rather than rush to judgment based on their political preferences, the story deserves to be reported.
The idea that because the nation is at war the president is above criticism is ludicrous. The idea that a president is above the law is even more ludicrous, but that’s the way it is in Ukraine: Can anybody name an agency or a person with the legal powers, ability and resources to investigate the president?
And while I love lawyers, generally, I don’t need a three-year law degree to appreciate the difference between tax evasion and tax avoidance and what is illegal vs. simply immoral. I and my colleagues have talked to more than a few lawyers today – some say Poroshenko looks to have violated the law, others say no or they don’t have enough information and still others just want to stay out of it.
No one, unsurprisingly, thinks the Ukrainian criminal justice system is capable of finding out the truth.
As for some of the other names in Panama Papers:
* Putin and his Kremlin cronies are the focus for many reasons, including a network of secret offshore deals and loans worth $2 billion. More is yet to come out.
* Lazarenko factors into the documents this way, according to OCCRP: “In August 2006, a U.S. court sentenced Lazarenko to nine years in prison. An appeals court confirmed the sentence in 2009 and sentenced him to 97 months in prison, a $9 million fine and forfeiture of $22,851,000 for money laundering. His conviction was the result of six-year investigation by the FBI and IRS, which traced Lazarenko laundering $30 million he extorted as prime minister through accounts in Poland, Switzerland, Antigua and the US. The court also established that Lazarenko used a US shell company to conceal the purchase of a multimillion-dollar residence in Marin County, California. He was released in November 2012.”
And how does the Kyiv Post publisher factor into the Panama Papers?
While he was never the focus of any investigation, there was a period in the 1990s when prosecutors were looking into whether one of Zahoor’s offshore companies had any connection to illegal gas trading schemes by Lazarenko and his alleged partner in crime, ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
The prosecutors found no connection and didn’t bother questioning Zahoor, who sat down with the OCCRP reporter, answered all questions and says to this very day — as prosecutors do — that he has no connection with Lazarenko or Tymoshenko. Neither Lazarenko nor Tymoshenko commented to the same OCCRP reporter.
So my point is this: Not everybody who is mentioned in the Panama Papers did something wrong.
But some are sure making it more difficult than others to find out.
Kyiv Post chief editor Brian Bonner can be reached at [email protected]
