Reformer of the week – Vadym Nikolayev
Vadym Nikolayev, one of the whistleblowers who has made allegations of corruption against the National Agency for Preventing Corruption, is now facing pressure due to his criticism.
The NAPC has opened several probes against Nikolayev, the head of the agency’s anti-corruption unit. He told the Kyiv Post that the agency was aiming to fire him.
Nikolayev has joined Hanna Solomatina and Oksana Divnich, top NAPC officials, in accusing their agency of large-scale corruption and fulfilling unlawful orders of the Presidential Administration. The NAPC and the Presidential Administration have denied the accusations.
Solomatina has published what she says is her correspondence with Oleksiy Horashchenkov, a Presidential Administration official, in which he attempts to give her orders. The Kyiv Post has also obtained the documents of the audit on which the corruption investigation is based.
In November, a case into alleged NAPC corruption 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.
In December, Solomatina said that the NAPC’s leadership was pressuring, punishing and firing whistleblowers, while a competition commission, one of whose members is Horashchenkov, is choosing the new top NAPC officials.
Meanwhile, Tetiana Shkrebko, a former top official of the NAPC, was given a 5-year suspended sentence in 2016 for embezzling Hr 3 billion in a scheme spearheaded by ex-President Viktor Yanukovych and his Tax and Revenue Minister Oleksandr Klymenko, according to a secret ruling leaked to the Nashi Hroshi watchdog and published on Jan. 16.
Despite having been convicted for graft, Shkrebko was later appointed as a deputy head of the NAPC’s department for financial and lifestyle monitoring and conducted many asset declaration checks with violations of the law, according to an audit conducted by Solomatina and Divnich.
Anti-reformer of the week – Giorgi Vashadze
Giorgi Vashadze, an advisor to President Petro Poroshenko’s Chief of Staff Ihor Rainin, has co-authored a bill that would give the president and his allies effective control over the selection of judges of the anti-corruption court.
The bill, which was submitted to parliament in December, has been lambasted by Ukrainian anti-corruption groups, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the European Union and the European Commission for Democracy through Law, better known as the Venice Commission.
The IMF and the World Bank said that Ukraine’s foreign partners and donors should have a crucial role in approving the appointment of anti-graft judges, rather than just an advisory one, as envisaged in Poroshenko’s bill.
Vashadze’s Fund for Innovation has received Hr 800,000 from President Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc, according to information from the National Agency for Preventing Corruption published on Feb. 5.
The pro-government majority in the Verkhovna Rada has refused to consider the bill on the anti-corruption court since December.
The crucial goal is to make sure that independent experts, not government-friendly ones, are chosen by Ukraine’s foreign partners and that they dominate the selection of anti-graft judges, Vitaly Tytych, a member of the Public Integrity Council, told the Kyiv Post.
Another task is to make sure that a transparent competition for the anti-graft court is held – in contrast to last year’s Supreme Court competition, when the High Qualification Commission arbitrarily awarded higher scores to loyalists and got rid of independent candidates, Tytych added. The Public Integrity Council said the competition had been rigged in favor of government loyalists, and no explanations whatsoever were given for specific scores and appointments, which was denied by the authorities.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian pro-government media and bloggers, including Karl Volokh, Viktor Ukolov and Taras Chornovil, spread fake news that the IMF and the World Bank had caved in to Poroshenko’s version of the anti-graft court bill and accepted it. The fake was uncovered on Jan. 31 by the Yevropeiska Pravda newspaper, which cited IMF and World Bank representatives as denying the claim.
Pro-Poroshenko bloggers and media also spread fake news that Satu Kahkonen, the World Bank’s regional director, had been fired because of the harsh tone of her letter to Ukrainian top officials on the anti-corruption court.
The trust in Ukraine’s judiciary was further damaged as it was revealed on Feb. 2 that Valentyna Simonenko, a nominee for the new Supreme Court, registered as a Russian taxpayer in Russian-annexed Crimea in 2015, according to the official register of Russia’s Federal Tax Service checked by the Kyiv Post.
