Hugues Mingarelli, the European Union’s outgoing ambassador to Ukraine, criticized Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky and called for re-launching the National Agency for Preventing Corruption.
Mingarelli, who is set to quit as ambassador in September, made the statements in an interview with the Evropeiska Pravda online newspaper published on July 26. Mingarelli will be replaced by Estonian diplomat Matti Maasikas.
Kholodnytsky’s office and the National Agency for Preventing Corruption (NAPC) were created under ex-President Petro Poroshenko. They were supposed to be brand-new institutions, immune from old agencies’ corruption and capable of fighting graft. However, they discredited themselves and have been involved in numerous scandals and controversies.
When asked about corruption, Mingarelli said that he prefers to speak of “rule of law,” to avoid further associating Ukraine with corruption. The country has a “terrible image” because of this association, he said. Nevertheless, he called for real results from the country’s anti-corruption bodies.
Kholodnytsky problem
Mingarelli said that the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office presents an obstacle to the rule of law, singling out the chief prosecutor.
“As far as the special anti-corruption prosecutor’s office is concerned, it’s clear that the problems are linked to Mr. Kholodnytsky personally,” he said. “It’s not my job to decide whether he should be replaced but it’s obvious that the chief anti-corruption prosecutor must be capable of good cooperation with the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), and there’s no such cooperation now.”
In March Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said that Kholodnytsky should be replaced “to ensure the integrity of anti-corruption institutions.”
Anti-corruption activists have been pressuring the authorities to fire Kholodnytsky for a year.
In April 2018 the NABU released audio recordings of Kholodnytsky tipping off suspects about their cases and pressuring judges and prosecutors. Kholodnytsky later confirmed that the tapes were authentic, but said his words had been taken out of context.
The NABU and anti-corruption activists called on the High Qualification Commission of Prosecutors to fire Kholodnytsky, but he ended up with only a reprimand.
The Security Service of Ukraine opened a criminal case against Kholodnytsky for revealing investigative secrets, but closed it in January.
President Volodymyr Zelensky has not supported anti-corruption watchdogs’ demand to fire Kholodnytsky and re-launch his office immediately. Instead, in June he gave Kholodnytsky and Artem Sytnyk, head of NABU, three months to show results.
If they do not show results, Zelensky will submit to parliament a bill to re-launch the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office and the NABU, Zelensky’s Deputy Chief of Staff Ruslan Riaboshapka said in June.
Later on – on July 17 – Zelensky hinted he wanted to replace the leadership of law enforcement agencies due to their lack of political will to investigate high-profile cases.
“The anti-corruption prosecutor’s office says the NABU is to blame for everything,” Zelensky said. “The NABU says that the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office is to blame. The prosecutor general says that everyone would have been jailed already if there had been political will.”
He said that “those law enforcement agencies have no political will.”
“And when they lack something, we’ll do our best to make sure that our country lacks those people,” Zelensky added.
When asked about NABU, Mingarelli said that a majority of experts believe it is working well and he has no reason to doubt them.
NAPC problem
The diplomat said that the National Agency for Preventing Corruption needs to create a way to automatically check officials’ asset declarations. Currently, e-declarations are checked manually, which thwarts the process and makes it much more difficult.
“We expect the NAPC to work properly but now this is not the case – at least, it’s incapable of checking electronic declarations,” Mingarelli said. “We believe that they must get the tools and the people that will allow them to be more effective.”
Automatic checks have been a demand of Ukraine’s Western partners for years and are one of the prerequisites for receiving 500 million euros in macroeconomic assistance. This would require Ukraine to re-launch the NAPC, said Mingarelli.
The NAPC has failed to punish top officials for violations in their asset declarations. The NAPC has denied the accusations of sabotage.
Hanna Solomatina, a whistleblower at the NAPC, said in 2017 that the agency was involved in large-scale corruption and was completely controlled by the presidential administration. The NAPC and the Poroshenko administration denied the accusations.
Solomatina published what she says is correspondence in which Oleksiy Horashchenkov, a presidential administration official, tried to give her orders. In 2018 Horashchenkov was fired from the administration.
A criminal case was opened into the accusations but no NAPC officials have been charged, fired or suspended so far.
Zelensky has supported civil society groups’ demand to replace the NAPC’s leadership and re-launch the agency.
