A new agency invested with great powers to fight corruption among Ukraine’s high-ranking officials, the State Investigations Bureau, has become mired in scandal even before it officially starts work.
Yuriy Makedon, a lawmaker with the dominant 135-member Bloc of Petro Poroshenko faction in parliament, has filed a lawsuit against the appointment November 2016 of Roman Truba as the chief of the new bureau. Makedon sought the job but didn’t succeed and has been claiming the competition was rigged to select Truba. His case is to be heard at Kyiv Administrative Court on Sept. 6.
And Makedon is not the only one who has questioned the legitimacy of Truba’s win.
Several other applicants for the job repeatedly complained about violations in the selection process and filed lawsuits against the commission that ran the competition to select the head of the State Investigations Bureau.
One of them was Vitaly Tytych, a lawyer who is also a member of the Public Integrity Council. He told the Kyiv Post that a court rejected his claim only this week after two years of litigation. Tytych is also representing two other complainants against the commission’s actions.
The external commission was comprised of nine members. The Verkhovna Rada, President Petro Poroshenko and the Cabinet of Ministers each nominated three members.
They were three members of parliament Vladyslav Bukharev (Batkivshchina), Yevhen Deydey (People’s Front), Mykola Palamarchuk (Petro Poroshenko Bloc); two professors of the Kyiv National University Roman Maydanyk and Viktor Samokhvalov and a partner at Sayenko Kharenko law firm Tetyana Slipachuk; a professor of Khmelnytskyi University of Management and Law Denys Monastyrskyi, Deputy Interior Minister Tetyana Kovalchuk and First Deputy Minister of Justice Natalia Sevostyanova.
“Some members of the commission didn’t comply with the statutory criteria,” Tytych said. It is known that at least one member, MP Bukharev, doesn’t have a law degree, which was supposed to be an obligatory requirement for a place on the commission.
Questions have also been raised regarding the appointment of one of the bureau’s chief deputies, Olha Varchenko.
“Initially, she wasn’t allowed to take part in the competition as she was under 35 at the time of her application,” Tytych said.“However, later not only was she approved to be eligible — she won the competition.”
The race for leadership of the State Investigations Bureau is understandable. The new law enforcement agency was created under pressure from Ukraine’s financial backers, and it takes a lot of power from the Prosecutor General’s Office, particularly, to investigate the highest-ranking officials for corruption.
Rejected candidates
Some anti-corruption activists believed that Roman Truba, a former prosecutor, was in fact a government loyalist, while the new investigations bureau is supposed to be completely independent of the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Presidential Administration.
But for a person accused of being a government puppet, Truba surprised everyone this week by rejecting 27 candidates for the most senior positions at his bureau.
The names of the 27, who were selected from 635 applicants to become top anti-corruption investigators, were leaked to Ukrainian media in July. There was a public outcry, as many of them were said to be protégés of the Interior Minister Arsen Avakov or the head of the National Police, Ihor Kupranets.
Truba said some candidates on the list had doubtful backgrounds.
“One was involved in a criminal investigation into state treason,” Truba told journalists on Aug. 28. “Another one was involved in money laundering. A number of candidates have been featured in journalistic investigations and criminal proceedings.”
He added that he couldn’t make a decision because the selection commission, which picked 27 winners, had destroyed the results of the candidates’ polygraph tests, although they were supposed to have been kept for five years.
“After the competition was over, the commission had to provide the candidates’ dossiers and polygraph test results. However, it made the surprising, illogical, and unlawful decision to destroy the test results,” he said.
Civil society, however, was not impressed by Truba’s seemingly sensible move.
Zlata Simonenko, an expert for the Reanimation Package of Reforms, said she found it odd that the head of the State Investigations Bureau had expressed doubts about the work of a commission that had chosen him earlier.
“So he trusts their choice of him, but not of his senior officers. He knew the commission and knew the candidates, but he kept silent and waited until the last minute,” she told the Kyiv Post.
“The selection process lasted a year. It was hard to gather the commission members. A crazy amount of resources were spent on it.”
She assumed that the commission had picked people who weren’t close to Truba’s entourage and therefore he, or whoever he is loyal to, wouldn’t have control over them. Truba would prefer to select top officials of his bureau internally, but it is unlikely that the parliament will vote for the change in the selection procedure, Simonenko said.
“They don’t want another NABU (the National Anti-Corruption Bureau), which is now completely independent from any influence,” she said.
Adding to the problem is the fact that the existing law doesn’t establish what has to be done if the bureau chief dismisses the candidates for top positions proposed by the commission. Does the process start anew? Should it be run by the same commission? Can the same people apply again?
What should those candidates do whose integrity was unmarred but who didn’t get jobs anyway?
None of these questions are answered by the current legislation.
Given the conundrum, it is unclear when the State Investigations Bureau will be able to start carrying out its function of investigating cases of corruption in the highest levels of power.
So far, the bureau has only hired administrative personnel. The competition to fill investigator vacancies is ongoing.
