Reformer of the week – Oksana Divnich

Oksana Divnich is one of the whistleblowers who exposed alleged corruption of the National Agency for Preventing Corruption in November.

Divnich, head of the NAPC’s internal audit unit, and Hanna Solomatina, head of the NAPC’s department for financial monitoring, on Nov. 15 said that the agency is involved in large-scale corruption and completely controlled by the Presidential Administration. The NAPC and the Presidential Administration denied the accusations.

Solomatina on Nov. 24 published what she says is correspondence in which Oleksiy Horashchenkov, a Presidential Administration official, is trying to give her orders. The Kyiv Post has also obtained the documents of an audit on which the corruption investigation is based.

The NAPC corruption case on Nov. 28 was transferred on the orders of Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky and Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko from the independent National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine to the presidentially controlled Security Service of Ukraine, in what critics, including Solomatina, believe to be an effort to destroy the case.

The investigation has seen no progress since then, and no one at the NAPC or the Presidential Administration has been suspended or fired in connection with the graft case.

The NABU had previously provided security guards to Solomatina to protect her as a whistleblower, while the SBU failed to provide security guards after the transfer of the case.

Solomatina said on Dec. 11 that the NAPC’s leadership is currently pressuring, punishing and firing whistleblowers, while a competition commission one of whose members is Horashchenkov is choosing new top NAPC officials.

The NAPC audit found that the asset declarations of some candidates for Supreme Court jobs were not checked properly because they contained no reference to the State Fiscal Service’s register. Moreover, the audit committee was prevented from auditing the rest of the Supreme Court candidates’ declaration checks.

For example, the Public Integrity Council, a civil society watchdog, found that information in the asset declarations of Supreme Court candidates Tetiana Frantovska and Valentyna Simonenko was different from that in government registers. However, the NAPC failed to indicate this fact.

Roman Maselko, a member of the Public Integrity Council, wrote on Dec. 16 that the NAPC had been dragging its feet on completing a check of Simonenko’s asset declaration for nine months. The High Council of Justice is set to consider appointing her as a Supreme Court judge on Dec. 28.

Anti-reformer of the week – Bohdan Lvov

Bohdan Lvov, head of the old High Commercial Court, was elected as the only deputy of the new Supreme Court’s chairwoman Valentyna Danishevska on Nov. 30 and chairman of the Supreme Court’s commercial chamber on Dec. 5.

Lvov, who denies the accusations of wrongdoing, is under investigation in a graft case against High Council of Justice member Pavlo Grechkivsky.

According to the investigators, Grechkivsky promised to help in a legal dispute with Lvov’s assistance for $500,000.

Lvov is also under investigation in the case in which ex-High Commercial Court Chairman Viktor Tatkov and his deputy Artur Yemelyanov have been charged with organizing the issuance of unlawful rulings. Tatkov and Yemelyanov are accused of having run one of the largest corruption and corporate raiding schemes under Yanukovych.

The High Commercial Court’s judges, including Lvov, voted to effectively get rid of the automatic distribution of court cases by assigning just one judge to each judicial specialization, which would allow Tatkov and Yemelyanov to handpick judges for cases that they wanted to profit from, according to the Public Integrity Council. Vitaly Tytych, a member of the Public Integrity Council, believes that this makes Lvov and other High Commercial Court judges accomplices in the Tatkov-Yemelyanov case.

The Public Integrity Council believes that Lvov falsified the conclusion that Tatkov is not subject to lustration under the law on the dismissal of top officials who served ex-President Viktor Yanukovych. Tatkov was fired under the lustration law in 2016 and fled the country the same year.

Lvov first served at court martials with his acquaintance Ihor Benedesyuk, who is currently chairman of the High Council of Justice, and then handled intellectual property cases at the High Commercial Court along with Benedesyuk. Lvov is accused of being appointed a Supreme Court judge due to the protection of presidential ally Benedesyuk, who admitted having a conflict of interest and was exempted from voting for Lvov as a Supreme Court judge.

Later Mykhailo Smokovych, head of the old High Administrative Court, was elected as head of the new Supreme Court’s administrative chamber, while Borys Hulko, chairman of the old High Specialized Court for Civil and Criminal Cases, became head of the Supreme Court’s civil cases chamber, and Stanislav Kravchenko became chairman of the court’s criminal cases chamber. All of them are reportedly closely linked to the government, and Lvov, Smokovych and Kravchenko were vetoed by the Public Integrity Council, a civil-society watchdog, due to accusations of corruption and unlawful decisions.

In August, Lvov and Hulko were filmed by Radio Liberty at the birthday party of Valery Heletei, who heads the presidential security guard detachment. Hulko was filmed walking out of the Presidential Administration by Radio Liberty in January.

Ivan Mishchenko, another newly-appointed judge of the Supreme Court, was filmed by Radio Liberty visiting the Presidential Administration on Nov. 29. He used to work at the Vasyl Kysyl and Partners law firm, where Poroshenko’s Deputy Chief of Staff Filatov was one of the partners.

In November, President Petro Poroshenko signed the credentials of 25 new Supreme Court judges vetoed by the Public Integrity Council because they believe them to be dishonest or corrupt, while the High Council of Justice nominated three more vetoed judges, which have yet to be approved by Poroshenko.