In the fast-rotating Ukrainian government, Pavlo Petrenko is a remarkably stable fixture.
Having become justice minister in February 2014 right after the EuroMaidan Revolution that toppled the corrupt regime of former President Viktor Yanukovych, Petrenko now begins his fourth year in the job.
Most attribute Petrenko’s longevity to his close friendship with Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the ex-prime minister and leader of parliament’s second biggest faction. Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, the only other minister who has been in the cabinet since the revolution, also comes from Yatsenyuk’s party.
While Petrenko’s remit is much narrower than that of the U. S. Justice Department, his ministry is still one of the most influential in the government.
While it doesn’t offer control of milkable state companies and multimillion-dollar procurement like other ministries – hence no big corruption scandals in Petrenko’s tenure – the Justice Ministry validates virtually every ruling of the government.
But even wielding such power can’t help Petrenko win some of his battles: Right now he is struggling to get a key asset recovery bill through parliament and to force an anti-graft agency to do its job, among other challenges.
Finding Yatsenyuk
A popular myth that circulates in the Ukrainian media is that Petrenko was a college classmate of Yatsenyuk, hence the ties between them.
But Petrenko debunks it: Although both come from the western Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi, they only met and joined forces in 2009.
Back then, Yatsenyuk – a young and ambitious former speaker of parliament – was running for president with his own custom-made party, the Front of Changes, a predecessor of today’s People’s Front.
Then-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk sits in the Cabinet’s box in the parliament on Dec. 24, 2015. Petrenko, now a close friend of the ex-prime minister, first came into politics by aiding Yatsenyuk’s election campaign in 2009. Photo Kostyantyn Chernichkin.
Petrenko says that he, a lawyer back then, approached Yatsenyuk and offered to help his campaign pro bono.
“I did it because I was concerned that (Viktor) Yanukovych might come to power,” Petrenko recalls. “The concern proved valid.”
Yatsenyuk came fourth with almost 7 percent of the vote, while Yanukovych won the second round against Yulia Tymoshenko. Yatsenyuk’s campaign ads were mocked for the discrepancy between his geeky looks and the military style of the ads.
And while the campaign failed to bring victory, it at least brought Yatsenyuk an ally in Petrenko. The two men liked working together and remain close friends.
With Yatsenyuk’s party, Petrenko was elected first to the Kyiv Oblast council, and then in 2012 to parliament on the party ticket of Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna, with which Yatsenyuk had merged his party.
The EuroMaidan protesters’ victory over the Yanukovych regime in 2014 made Yatsenyuk one of the two main power centers in post-Maidan Ukraine – with now President Petro Poroshenko and his party being the other one.
Petrenko was justice minister in the two post-Maidan Yatsenyuk cabinets, and retained his seat after Yatsenyuk was replaced by the president’s protégé, Volodymyr Groysman, in April, marking a shift in power towards Poroshenko’s camp.
While Yatsenyuk himself has been out of the public eye since stepping down from the office in April, he retains a presence in the government – at least through Petrenko. Today, Petrenko sees Yatsenyuk at least once a week, and the ex-prime minister advises him on current affairs.
Groysman doesn’t seem to mind: Petrenko appears to get along well with him. It helps that Groysman isn’t critical of his predecessor – in spite of the Ukrainian political tradition of badmouthing the person in office before you.
“I have a good working and human relationship (with Groysman),” Petrenko says. “If you behave decently, you can count on your colleagues to do so in return.”
Under Petrenko, the Justice Ministry has granted the public access to several state registers, including the property and business ownership. In other victories, the ministry rammed through the package of bills required for Ukraine to gain visa-free travel with the European Union.
But in Petrenko’s own assessment, his biggest achievement is making the ministry’s free legal aid services available to more vulnerable groups, including veterans and the internally displaced people, of which there are at least 1.7 million.
Confiscation battle
One of the biggest issues on today’s agenda is asset recovery. Since 2015, the Justice Ministry has been working on a “special confiscation” bill that would bring in a mechanism to confiscate the money of Yanukovych’s close circle – which is still frozen in Ukrainian banks accounts.
At stake is $1.5 billion – most of it sitting in the state-owned Oschadbank. The accounts belong to offshore firms linked to top people from the Yanukovych government who now live in Russia.
Parliament’s resistance to the bill has been unprecedented, Petrenko says.
The bill went through several drafts, as some worried it could be used to confiscate all sorts of assets in the future.
When the ministry filed the final draft last year, parliament still failed to pass it. It took three months and six votes just to put it on parliament’s agenda. When it was finally put to the vote, only 176 lawmakers supported it, while 226 votes were needed.
While parties with ties to the former regime, mainly the Opposition Bloc, understandably didn’t vote for the confiscation, many in the democratic parties failed to vote for too – which angers Petrenko.
“We give them this bill, which essentially represents the promise that got them elected, and they simply leave the session hall,” Petrenko says, shrugging his shoulders. “When I ask them why, they just look at the floor.”
Petrenko says the lawmakers must have been “financially motivated” not to vote. The alleged bribes must be paid by people from Yanukovych’s circle residing in Russia who hope to reclaim the frozen money one day.
“To me, not voting for this bill should mean political death,” Petrenko says.
Petrenko will try to push the law through parliament again soon. Yatsenyuk tells him that there still is a chance.
The matter is pressing: The state budget for 2017 planned the bill would bring in Hr 10.5 billion out of the entire annual budget income of Hr 731 billion. Without the confiscation law, the state budget will face a significant deficit.
There is another issue. Ukraine also hopes to return the money of the Yanukovych regime that is frozen in accounts abroad. The failure of the confiscation bill in Ukraine sends a bad signal.
“What will other countries that froze their money think when they see that we can’t do anything here?” Petrenko asks, rhetorically.
Minister vs. NAZK
But more than the lawmakers’ unwillingness to return Yanukovych’s money, Petrenko is worried by the blocking of the work of the National Agency for Corruption Prevention, known in Ukraine as NAZK.
Petrenko claims that the independent agency is not doing its job, failing to check the electronic declarations of income and assets that all Ukrainian public servants filed in November. Three months after they were filed, not a single declaration has been checked by the agency.
Instead, Petrenko argues, the agency is investigating ex-head of Odesa Customs Office Yulia Marushevska for allegedly giving herself a salary bonus of Hr 500, or about $18.
The agency, on the other hand, claimed that the Justice Ministry didn’t provide access to the state registers. Petrenko said the agency simply failed to satisfy technical demands to get access.
Petrenko also says how the body took months to develop a mechanism for checking e-declarations, and the ministry ended up developing it for them. Since the mechanism needs to be approved by the justice ministry, the agency later formally gave the ministry its own document for approval.
“We can’t keep doing their work for them,” says Petrenko, adding that an agency that costs the budget Hr 600 million a year should be able to pick up the slack.
Speaking at the cabinet meeting in February, head of the anti-graft agency Natalia Korchak said that NAZK wasn’t ready to handle the declarations properly, but will learn from its mistakes and improve.
While criticizing the agency, Petrenko hesitates to say who’s responsible for the alleged sabotage.
“I don’t know who’s influencing them. I really don’t. The government isn’t, that’s for sure,” he says.
Instead, Petrenko blames the way the agency is organized. He wants to reform it from a collegial body into an organization with a single manager who can be held accountable. He claims it won’t affect the agency’s independence, but simply will ensure its accountability.
Fighting raiders
One of the justice ministry’s recent achievements is the anti-raiding law, which came into force in November.
The law aims to stop raiding that takes place by making illegal changes to the state registers of property rights and business owners. A typical scheme involves a corrupt notary changing the ownership of a property or company in the state register, using a fake sale document as pretext, followed by a physical takeover of the property.
The new law stipulates that all business owners have to be notified when a change regarding their property is being made in the register, and expands the time when a former owner can challenge the change in court from 30 to 60 days.
Also, when a protocol of the business owners gathering is used as a pretext to make changes, the signatures now need to be attested by a notary.
