Editor’s Note: This op-ed was originally published in Russian and Ukrainian in Novoe Vremya, a Ukrainian weekly magazine where Vitaliy Sych is the chief editor, on Dec. 6. It was translated and republished with the author’s permission.
Not so long ago the Novoe Vremya magazine published its annual ranking of the 100 richest Ukrainians. What astonished me about the list was the metamorphosis of one of the former ministers of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych.
Ex-Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevsky took 11th place in the ranking, his net worth being $636 million. This 2.5 times more than he had in 2013, the last year of Yanukovych’s rule.
What is surprising about this hike is that only recently Ukrainian law enforcers accused Zlochevsky of dire financial crimes he allegedly committed in his time as a minister. Prosecutor General’s Office boasted countless folders describing his crimes. Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko publicly said that the state budget lost Hr 1 billion in taxes unpaid by Zlochevsky’s companies.
Zlochevsky, the founder of Burisma Group, grew his business by giving licenses for natural gas extraction to his companies in his time as ecology minister. If one uses a soccer metaphor, Zlochevsky was both a player and a judge in the field.
I was sure that the Ukrainian justice system was just about to get Zlochevsky. I thought that in a scenario best for him, Zlochevsky lost his fortune and is hiding from Interpol somewhere in the mountains of Paraguay, attaching a fake beard and wearing sunglasses when he needs to go buy groceries.
But it turns out that no one is looking for Zlochevsky anymore, there are hardly any accusations against him, his business in Ukraine is rapidly growing, and he prefers to live in Dubai.
How is it possible, you may ask.
Well, watch this.
Immediately after the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2014, a London court arrests $23.5 million in Zlochevsky’s companies’ accounts, suspecting an illegal origin of the money. British law enforcers come to Kyiv to consult with their Ukrainian colleagues. But somehow the Prosecutor General’s Office gives Zlochevsky’s lawyer a note saying his client isn’t a suspect in any case. The British shrug; Zlochevsky gets his controversial millions back.
Next the Prosecutor General’s Office transfers the case to the police, then takes it back, and then even issues an arrest warrant for Zlochevsky in January 2015. But the money is gone. Then Lutsenko becomes prosecutor general and Zlochevsky’s companies failed to pay Hr 1 billion in taxes. Several months later, a company owned by Zlochevsky pays Hr 180 million in taxes. The prosecutor closes the case.
Immediately after this, journalists spot Zlochevsky meeting with Ihor Kononenko, a lawmaker with the Petro Poroshenko Bloc and a close ally of the president, in a restaurant in Vienna. They publish their photo together. Kononenko claims it was photoshopped.
And finally, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, or NABU, finds that Zlochevsky’s companies obtained part of their gas extraction licenses illegally, and asks the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office to get the licenses annulled in court. But the SAPO misses the six-month deadline for filing the case to court, blaming it on a different agency’s sluggishness.
And that’s it: there are no more accusations against Zlochevsky. A simple trick, that’s all. Now, Zlochevsky can take off the fake beard and leave the mountains of Paraguay. Moreover, he can climb up in the richest Ukrainians ranking and nearly make the top 10.
In a similar fashion, all the highest-ranking officials of the Yanukovych regime — Sergiy Arbuzov, Oleksandr Klymenko, Sergiy Kurchenko, Andriy Kliuyev, Yuriy Ivaniushchenko, the ex-president’s son Oleksandr Yanukovych, etc, — slipped through the fingers of the Ukrainian prosecutors and the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU. They even managed to keep most of their businesses in Ukraine.
The story of the Yanukovych family getting their money out of Ukraine is even worse. A recent investigation of the investigative show Schemes (a project by the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and UA:Pershiy TV channel) showed that proxies withdrew Hr 2 billion from the now-liquidated bank of the Yanukovych family through another bank where the main beneficiary is President Petro Poroshenko. People who used to work as office managers and designers at the Yanukovych bank withdrew Hr 40-80 million in cash from the Poroshenko bank.
It’s hard to dismiss it as a coincidence that the Yanukovych family proxies chose the president’s bank, which isn’t even in the top 20 biggest banks in Ukraine.
The bank management and law enforcers cited the ruling of the Pechersk Court in Kyiv that lifted the arrest of these bank accounts. But what if tomorrow some court in Vyshhorod rules to give two Ukrainian oblasts to Hungary or three oblasts to Poland? Are we going to just shrug our shoulders and do it?
This case was barely noticed by the Ukrainian media, and the president got away with just a little scare. Somehow I think that if in a neighboring country, Poland or the Czech Republic, a bank owned by the current president helped the family of the ex-president, who ordered to shoot protesters in the capital city to cash out a huge sum of money, there would be a giant scandal.
The presidency of Poroshenko brought Ukraine the visa-free regime with the European Union and is about to bring it an independent church. In these five years, companies like Ryanair and H&M entered Ukraine, and Ikea is about to open its first store. And it’s great.
But can trendy clothes and cheap Swedish stools compare to having justice? Not just the rule of law, but the feeling of justice existing in the community in a more general sense? I don’t think so.
Recently on Facebook, I made some ironic comments about the “euroblyakha” movement’s (the Ukrainians driving cars with European Union license plates that never got custom clearance) initiative to nominate a candidate for the presidency. I pointed out it was funny. But one of the commentators asked why I wasn’t laughing about the president’s foundation getting Hr 1 billion from the budget or the billion-hryvnia corrupt schemes in energy enterprises. What he meant was – why they can do something like that and we can’t even skip customs clearance on an old car? And really, why can’t they?
Five years of Poroshenko’s presidency didn’t satisfy the society’s main requirement, the one that caused the events of 2014, and which is still the main problem of the country – Ukraine still doesn’t have a system that guarantees justice. And there aren’t any visible attempts to create one.
If we had a system that guarantees justice, the ones making money would be top managers and entrepreneurs, not those who steal from the budget and lobby for industrial groups in the parliament. It would mean that the ones winning in the courts are the ones who are actually right. It would mean inevitable punishment for the marauders of the Yanukovych times and for those who are robbing the state enterprises today to fill the political parties’ budgets. It would mean the end of the SBU raiding and robbing businesses, and whole oblasts being leased to the local elites in exchange for political loyalty and votes.
A system that guarantees justice is a fundamental thing that can bring Ukraine’s economy billions of dollars of foreign and domestic investments. It can encourage many talented people to join the process of change making.
It’s a big and fair game with high stakes, not balancing between several influence groups and chasing political ratings.
Clearly, building such a system in five years isn’t easy. But they should’ve at least tried. At the very least, they shouldn’t have helped the family of a kleptomaniac who killed 100 people on the country’s main square to launder their stolen billions.
Vitaliy Sych is a Ukrainian journalist and the chief editor of Novoe Vremya, a popular weekly magazine.
