The average monthly salary in Ukraine is less than $400. The monthly salary of a Constitutional Court judge is around $7,500, or 20 times the country’s average.
However, even those salaries can’t explain the vast riches that appear in the online asset declarations of some of the court’s 15 judges, who spent most of their lives in public service. Conscious of the fact that their wealth can raise questions, some judges prefer to register their properties in the names of their relatives, thus keeping some of it off their declarations.
This would have been a crime. But, on Oct. 27, the Constitutional Court killed the law requiring officials to declare their assets as well as the criminal liability for failing to declare possessions.
By doing that, the judges put the country on the brink of a crisis, possibly costing it billions in Western aid. It led to suspicions that judges could have been influenced or even bribed to do so. They deny it.
Yet now, a closer look at the judges’ declarations shows riches that can’t be explained by their legal income.
Crimean paradise
Chairman of the Constitutional Court Oleksandr Tupytsky became famous overnight after his court effectively destroyed Ukraine’s asset declaration system for officials.
Immediately, Ukrainian investigative journalists dug into Tupytsky’s own assets, and they weren’t disappointed.
They found that Tupytsky failed to disclose that he bought a land plot in Russian-occupied Crimea in 2018, four years after Russia annexed the peninsula. He already owned a house in Crimea from before the occupation, which he declared.
Ukrainian authorities opened a high treason investigation against Tupytsky. By buying the land, they suggest, the Ukrainian judge effectively recognized Russia’s rule in Crimea.
Tupytsky has long had a soft spot for Russia and Crimea.
In 2014, when Russia invaded the peninsula and held an illegal “referendum” to justify its occupation, Ukraine’s Constitutional Court ruled such actions unconstitutional. Tupytsky supported the ruling yet wrote a dissenting opinion: He thought that the court didn’t have the authority to weigh in on such matters.
When asked why he didn’t declare his land in Crimea, the judge said he “didn’t know” how to do it correctly.
Tupytsky also didn’t declare a house near Kyiv and land plots that are legally owned by his mother and mother-in-law, both retirees. He couldn’t convincingly explain how they afforded the property, suggesting that his mother-in-law bought an elite mansion near Kyiv after selling an apartment in the occupied city of Donetsk.
The judge’s apartment in Kyiv is worth about $1 million.
Tupytsky’s whole career has been in courts. Before becoming a Constitutional Court judge in 2013, Tupytsky worked in low-level courts in Donetsk, Lviv and Dnipropetrovsk Oblasts.
Such a career could hardly have paid for his family’s collection of real estate. Even with his current earnings at the Constitutional Court, it would have required Tupytsky to save all his income for 30 years to purchase what he owns.
Strangely, Tupytsky also declared that he is registered in a house near Kyiv owned by businessman Serhiy Levchenko. Levchenko ran on the ticket of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People party in the Oct. 25 local elections. His campaign ads called him an associate of lawmaker Oleksandr Dubinsky, a close ally of oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky.
Land owners
Other Constitutional Court judges don’t lag behind the chairman. Some of them also declared possessions far exceeding their earnings. Some have acquired enormous amounts of land.
Judge Serhiy Sas has been a longstanding supporter of ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Before becoming a Constitutional Court judge in 2014, he spent nearly two decades as a lawmaker for Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna party.
Their connection remains strong, with both eager to see Ukraine reinstate the archaic land moratorium which would ban people from buying land for agricultural needs. This is odd, considering that Sas was able to privatize 9 hectares (22 acres) of land in Kirovohrad Oblast.
The lowest estimate of his possessions is over $1.5 million.
Sas lags behind the family of judge Oleksandr Kasminin. They own 17 land plots, which add up to over 23 hectares (57 acres) of land in Poltava Oblast.
In his declaration, Kasminin wrote that each land plot cost him $1,000, which is 200 times below the average market price. Kasminin has been an attorney and later a judge since the early 1990s.
However, Kasminin didn’t have anywhere to live in Kyiv and was allowed to privatize a state-owned apartment in Kyiv.
Another judge, Viktor Kryvenko keeps up with the trend. Working all his life as a judge, Kryvenko was able to take possession of 44 land plots, a chalet in Bukovel, Ukraine’s elite ski resort, and a hotel in the neighboring Dragobrat ski resort.
Judge Petro Filyuk is also not shy about holding vast land plots. An acquaintance of lawmaker Ihor Palytsa, Kolomoisky’s political and business partner, Filyuk privatized 2.5 hectares (6 acres) of land in Volyn Oblast. In 2019, Ukrainian journalists reported that a mansion now stands on the land owned by Filyuk.
According to Filyuk, he received the land for free because it was a scrapheap and he helped refurbish it.
Russian pension
Interestingly, several judges from the court with unchecked powers and influence on Ukraine’s future have connections to Russia, a country which has been waging a war against Ukraine since 2014.
Tupytsky has a land plot in Crimea, which he bought under the occupation. His mother-in-law is in Russian-occupied Donetsk, according to Tupytsky, despite owning a house near Kyiv.
Judge Iryna Zavhorodnya has an even more straightforward connection — her husband is a Russian citizen. According to her declaration, her husband’s only income is a small pension he gets in Russia. But since 2018, when Zavhorodnya was appointed to the Constitutional Court, her husband bought two elite apartments, with a total worth of over $1 million, and a BMW.
The National Agency for Preventing Corruption (NAPC) ruled that Zavhorodnya’s husband didn’t have enough funds to buy those apartments.
Zavhorodnya supported the court’s Oct. 27 ruling to destroy declarations for officials, including judges like herself.
Besides the apartments, the judge’s family owns a 2,500-square-meter land plot near Kyiv which is registered in the name of Zavhorodnya’s mother-in-law.
In 2017, the 81-year-old woman gave her son, Zavhorodnya’s husband, some $120,000 as a gift, according to the judge’s declaration.
The National Agency for Preventing Corruption has been on the tails of Constitutional Court judges for years. Multiple judges had conflicts of interest when voting to dismantle the agency’s work. The NAPC said that judges Zavhorodnya and Serhiy Holovaty had conflicts of interest but voted for the decision, which is banned by the law.
The agency said it had identified incorrect information on assets worth Hr 3.6 million ($1.5 million) in Holovaty’s asset declaration and incorrect information on assets worth Hr 1.4 million ($600,000) in Zavhorodnya’s declaration. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine has opened a criminal case against Zavhorodnya.
The case must be closed after the Constitutional Court’s Oct. 27 ruling.
The NAPC also said that Constitutional Court judges Ihor Slidenko and Volodymyr Moisyk had failed to declare changes in their assets on time, which is a misdemeanor.
Slidenko and Moisyk were surprisingly lucky: They were supposed to stand trial for improperly declaring their assets a few days after the judges voted that it was now legal to not declare assets.
Editor’s Note: This report is part of the Investigative Hub project, within which the Kyiv Post team monitors investigative reports in the Ukrainian media and brings them to the English-speaking audience. The project is supported by the National Endowment for Democracy. This story uses reports from three Ukrainian investigative teams: Bihus.Info, Schemes (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty), and Anti-Corruption Action Center.
