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Thomas Firestone – reformer of the week
Thomas Firestone is the only current candidate to be an auditor of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine from parliament who could be independent from the Ukrainian authorities and who has relevant anti-corruption experience.
Firestone has significant experience in the U.S. pre-trial investigation bodies and the U.S. Attorney’s Office: he spent six years at the Eastern District of New York where he prosecuted organized crime cases, with a focus on corruption and money laundering related to Russian oligarchs.
Firestone worked with Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky and is currently a persona non grata in Russia. In 2012 the United States passed the Magnitsky Act, which sanctions Russian officials implicated in the murder of Magnitsky in 2009.
He also served as the lead U.S. prosecutor in the extradition of Pavel Borodin, a Russian government official, to Switzerland to face charges of money laundering and embezzlement.
Firestone was recommended to the post of a NABU auditor by the U.S. Embassy and Transparency International Ukraine.
All the other candidates for a NABU auditor – Valery Neboga, Yuriy Likhnenko, Volodymyr Vasylenko and Vadym Melamed – are believed to be loyalists of the authorities and do not have relevant experience. Likhnenko showed his bias against the NABU on May 16, saying that its activities are “illegal.”
According to the Apostrof news site’s sources, Vasylenko is the government’s preferred candidate for a NABU auditor. His son is Andriy Vasylenko, a member of the pro-presidential High Qualification Commission.
Parliament’s anti-corruption committee, now dominated by Poroshenko Bloc and People’s Front lawmakers, continued its efforts to impose a pro-government NABU auditor earlier this week.
Three NABU auditors must be appointed: by parliament, the Cabinet and the president.
Since the leadership of the NABU can be fired as a result of an audit, President Petro Poroshenko has been accused of trying to install auditors loyal to him so that he can control the bureau and potentially fire NABU Chief Artem Sytnyk.
In May 2017 Mykhailo Buromensky, an alleged loyalist of the authorities, was appointed as a NABU auditor by the Cabinet of Ministers.
In February 2017, the pro-Poroshenko majority unsuccessfully tried to push through parliament the appointment of another controversial loyalist, Briton Nigel Brown, as a NABU auditor, without the anti-corruption committee’s approval. In July 2017 the pro-government majority in the Rada also unsuccessfully tried to appoint their protege Oleksandra Yanovska.
Anti-reformer of the week – Oleksiy Malovatsky
Oleksiy Malovatsky, who was a lawyer for President Petro Poroshenko’s 2014 election campaign, was appointed to the High Council of Justice due to vote buying, according to alleged Whatsapp correspondence between fugitive lawmaker Oleksandr Onyshchenko and allies of Poroshenko published by the Slidstvo.info investigative show on May 10.
Poroshenko and his allies deny the accusations of corruption.
In May 2015 Poroshenko’s top ally and lawmaker Igor Kononenko asked Onyshchenko to talk to Batkivshchyna party leader Yulia Tymoshenko about voting for the appointment of Malovatsky to the High Council of Justice in exchange for money.
Another member of the High Council of Justice, Pavlo Grechkivsky, has been charged with fraud, and ex-High Commercial Court Chairman Bohdan Lvov, who became the Supreme Court’s only deputy chairman as a result of last year’s competition, is also under investigation in the case.
According to the investigators, Grechkivsky promised to help in a legal dispute with Lvov’s assistance for $500,000. Prosecutors sent the Grechkivsky case to court in October.
Meanwhile, High Council of Justice Chairman Ihor Benedysyuk was simultaneously a judge of a Russian court martial and a Ukrainian one in 1994, according to his official biography on the council’s site. Russian citizenship was a necessary precondition of being a Russian judge, and that is why his appointment as a judge of Ukraine was illegal, since he had Russian citizenship and there is no proof that he was a Ukrainian citizen when he was appointed to the Ukrainian court, according to the Public Integrity Council.
Benedesyuk claimed on Feb. 2 that he had received his first Ukrainian passport in 1996 and had never had a Russian passport. Most likely, that means he received Ukrainian citizenship in 1996 (so the Public Integrity Council believes he was illegally a Ukrainian judge in 1994-1996). The usual practice during that time is that he would have been given a Russian citizenship stamp in his Soviet passport – therefore he did not need a Russian passport to be considered a Russian citizen. Therefore, Benedesyuk was a Russian citizen until 1996 and had no right to be a Ukrainian judge, members of the Public Integrity Council argue.
Meanwhile, the High Council of Justice has been discredited due to last year’s controversial competition for Supreme Court judges. The Public Integrity Council believes it was rigged in favor of government loyalists.
Thirty discredited judges who do not meet integrity standards (according to the Public Integrity Council) were nominated for the Supreme Court by the High Qualification Commission, and 29 of them were approved by the High Council of Justice. Poroshenko has already appointed 27 of them to the Supreme Court (out of 115 appointees). These judges have undeclared wealth, participated in political cases, made unlawful rulings (including those recognized as unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights) or are being investigated in corruption cases.
The High Council of Justice further discredited itself on May 15, when it refused to fire Ukrainian judges who still live in Luhansk Oblast’s Russian-occupied territories.
