While the nation has been staggered by the obscene wealth declared by some top officials in Ukraine in their electronic asset declarations, several officials have missed the deadline to unveil their fortunes.
According to the Prevention of Corruption bill approved in 2015, all government and parliament officials who held senior positions as of the day of the electronic declaration system’s launch on Sept. 1 were to have filed asset declarations by Oct. 30.
The National Agency of Corruption Prevention website reported on Oct. 31 that more than 80,000 asset declarations had been submitted to the system.
However, some famous names were still missing from the online asset registry on Nov. 3.
There were no declarations by Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the former prime minister of Ukraine, or Boris Lozhkin, the former head of the Presidential Administration on the public registry website.
Lawmakers such as Serhiy Kluyev (Opposition Bloc), Oleksandr Onyshchenko (Volya Narodu), Maria Matios (Bloc of Petro Poroshenko), Vyacheslav Boguslayev, Anatoliy Girshfeld (VolyaNarodu), Ihor Shkirya (Vidrodzhennya) and Yuriy Shukhevych (Radical Party) also failed to submit asset declarations.
Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, whose wife Iryna, a lawmaker of the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko, declared several apartments in Kyiv and land plots in Kyiv Oblast, issued a warning to those who had missed the deadline in a Facebook post.
“If all of you don’t file your e-declarations soon, there will be consequences for you,” Lutsenko wrote.“If you deliberately failed to file a declaration, you will be fined or be sentenced to 150 to 240 hours of community work, or up to two years in jail, with a three-year ban on working in government.”
Oleksandr Kalytenko of corruption watchdog Transparency International Ukraine told the Kyiv Post that from Oct. 31 the National Agency of Corruption Prevention will give all lawmakers who failed to file a declaration 10 days to explain why they missed the deadline.
“If they have no reasonable excuse, they will be fined (more than Hr 40,000 ($1,600) for failure to meet the e-declaration deadline. There is no list of things that can be considered reasonable excuses in the bill, so the agency will have to decide by itself,” said Kalytenko.
Lucky ones
There are some exemptions: Yatsenyuk, Lozhkin, and other Ukrainian officials who were dismissed from their posts before Sept.1, are to file their e-declarations by April 1, 2017, with information about their assets and income in 2016.
Lozhkin, who left the head of presidential administration position in Aug 29, some 10 days after the failure of the first attempt to launch the e-declaration system (on Aug. 15), still has the high post of adviser to President Petro Poroshenko.
However, his appointment was made on a voluntary basis, so technically he is not a government official any more.
“Yatsenyuk and Lozhkin have filed their declarations for 2015 on paper. Now they will only have to reveal their assets online in 2016,” said Kalytenko.
Yatsenyuk’s paper declaration, which was published on his website, reads that the total income of the former prime minister of Ukraine was Hr 19.6 million ($780,000), of which Hr 81,721 ($3,269) was his official salary. There are no details about the businesses he owns or any of his valuable possessions.
Lozhkin’s income was not so impressive – only Hr 627,866 ($25,115) in 2015, while the total income of his family was Hr 17 million ($680,000).
Not guilty?
Some lawmakers had excuses for not filing their declarations in time. Serhiy Klyuyev, an Opposition Bloc lawmaker and ally of ousted former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who is wanted by the Security Service of Ukraine in numerous accusations ranging from embezzlement and fraud to money laundering and vote rigging, is a fugitive of Ukrainian justice abroad.
So is the London-based Oleksandr Onyshchenko, a Volya Narodu Party lawmaker suspected of committing a $120-million fraud. On Facebook, Onyshchenko blamed the National Anti-corruption Bureau (NABU) detectives investigating his case for his failure to declare his assets.
“It’s not that I didn’t want to file – I couldn’t,” Onyshchenko wrote.“The NABU’s detectives have confiscated all of my documents with information about my income, dividends, shares of profits, and a lot else. I can’t file the declaration properly without those papers. It’s just impossible to remember all those numbers.”
Maria Matios, a lawmaker from the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko, who is a writer and the sister of Ukrainian Military Prosecutor Anatoliy Matios, told Ukrainska Pravda news website that she had failed to file her assets due to health problems.
“I have been in the hospital since the middle of September, and I will file my declaration after being discharged. I have informed the agency of this,” Matios told Ukrainian online newspaper Ukrainska Pravda.
The lawmaker said she would declare her collections of ancient Motanka dolls and embroidered Vyshyvanka shirts dating from the 18th to the 21th centuries, along with some paintings and jewelry.
Volya Narodu lawmakers Anatoliy Girshfeld and Vyacheslav Boguslayev failed to file their declarations due to technical problems with the electronic registry and mistakes in their declarations, read a statement by the faction’s press service published on Facebook.
Boguslayev, the former CEO of the Motor Sich engine plant, (he was dismissed in 2013) was a former member of the pro-Yanukovych Party of Regions,and was listed as one of the richest Ukrainians in 2013 by Focus magazine, with a net worth of $1 billion.
