Reformer of the week – Sergiy Petukhov
Sergiy Petukhov, a deputy justice minister, has fought against attempts to sabotage the system of electronic asset and income declarations for public officials. Petukhov, who oversees European integration at his ministry, filed his declaration on Oct. 1.
He said on Oct. 4 that very few officials had submitted their declarations.
Not a single minister had filed a declaration, and only one out of Ukraine’s 423 Verkhovna Rada members had filed one, he said. As of Oct. 6, only 3,717 officials, or 7 percent of Ukrainian officials and politicians, have submitted their declarations, as time runs out before the Oct. 31 deadline.
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau said on Oct. 6 its detectives had stopped filing declarations because the system’s templates did not comply with the law.
Anti-graft activist Vitaly Shabunin wrote on Sept. 27 that the State Service for Government Communications was constantly changing the e-declaration software, leading to numerous technical problems, which could result in a possible failure to punish corrupt officials in the courts.
Meanwhile, the police are investigating an attempt to forge an electronic declaration. Lawmakers Anton Gerashchenko from the People’s Front and Ivan Vinnyk from President Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc have been accused of involvement in the forgery, but deny the accusations.
Anti-reformer of the week- Ihor Hryniv
Ihor Hryniv, the head of President Petro Poroshenko’s faction in parliament, on Sept. 29 submitted a bill seeking to ban public access to major aspects of electronic declarations and abolish criminal responsibility for lying in them, effectively killing the whole declaration system.
If Hryniv’s bill had been passed, he would not have had to declare his expensive Orthodox Christian icon collection. He told the Ukrainska Pravda online newspaper in 2011 that he had about 300 icons, with experts estimating their value to be in the millions of dollars.
Hryniv said on Oct. 3 he was withdrawing his bill after consulting with Poroshenko. He blamed civil society’s “lack of understanding” for the move, but promised to submit another amendment to the e-declarations legislation.
Neither Hryniv nor Poroshenko have so far filed their electronic declarations.
Officials are also using loopholes, such as their relatives’ alleged failure to inform them of their property, divorcing their spouses to avoid declaring assets, and hiding the real source of revenues by identifying them as cash loans.
The e-declaration site became completely unavailable due to a power supply cut on Oct. 4, though access to it was restored later.
