Reformer of the week: Volodymyr Omelyan
Infrastructure Minister Volodymyr Omelyan has criticized Wojciech Balczun, CEO of railway monopoly Ukrzaliznytsia.
Omelyan and ex-Deputy Infrastructure Minister Volodymyr Shulmeister have accused Balczun of protecting the interests of Yaroslav Dubnevych and Bohdan Dubnevych, lawmakers from President Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc, at his firm. Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, another Poroshenko ally, backed Balczun in the conflict. The Dubnevych brothers and Balczun deny the graft accusations.
Last year Omelyan also supported the cancellation of an allegedly rigged Hr 1 billion tender at Yuzhny Port won by a firm linked to Serhiy Faermark, a lawmaker from the People’s Front party.
Omelyan said in a Feb. 1 interview with the liga.net news site that Ukraine was going back to the “Brezhnev era” and there had been almost no progress in terms of reform.
In December Infrastructure Minister Volodymyr Omelyan and acting Health Minister Ulana Suprun also dismissed ongoing competitions for state secretary jobs as rigged procedures used by corrupt interests to impose their representatives on government ministries.
Meanwhile, Shulmeister exposed pervasive corruption schemes in Ukrainian infrastructure in a Feb. 1 interview with the liga.net online newspaper, saying that $2 billion was being stolen at Ukrzaliznytsia annually. He accused Poroshenko allies Ihor Kononenko and Mykhailo Beilin; Leonid Yurushev, an associate of ex-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, and tycoons Rinat Akhmetov and Ihor Kolomoisky of having vested interests in infrastructure and trying to influence the Infrastructure Ministry. They deny the accusations.
After ex-Infrastructure Minister Andrei Pivovarsky’s team tried to remove an alleged corruption scheme at the Ukrainian Danube Shipping Company and fire its CEO Dmytro Barinov, a protégé of People’s Front lawmaker Maxim Burbak, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov heavily criticized them and told them not to do that, Shulmeister said.
Anti-reformer of the week: Natalia Korchak
The National Agency for Preventing Corruption, headed by Natalia Korchak, has so far failed to check a single official’s electronic asset declaration since the declaration system was launched last September.
Korchak is a protégé of the People’s Front party, while her deputy Ruslan Radetzky is a loyalist of President Petro Poroshenko.
One obstacle for the agency’s failure to check declarations is that the rules for such checks have not been approved yet. The Justice Ministry on Jan. 19 refused to register the agency’s draft rules, saying that they set indefinite terms for inspections and did not include looking into unlawful enrichment and conflicts of interest.
Instead of checking declarations, the National Agency for Preventing Corruption has focused on launching two minor administrative cases against an opponent of Poroshenko, lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko. He believes them to be politically motivated.
Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman lambasted Korchak for her inaction on Feb. 1. He also wondered if the second stage of e-declarations, scheduled to be completed by April 1, would not be derailed similarly to the first one last year. The second stage applies to lower-level officials.
Previously Ukrainian authorities had been dragging their feet on launching the e-declaration system since March 2015, when Korchak’s agency was formally set up, until September 2016. Korchak and other top officials were accused of intentionally derailing the process. Korchak denies all the accusations.
