And that’s why Ukraine’s broken
criminal justice system has not prosecuted or brought to trial any big corruption suspects – zero.
That means the $11.4 billion stolen from the banking system is
not coming back anytime soon, nor will anybody be held accountable for the
looting. That means the $40 billion pilfered by ex-President Viktor Yanukovych
and his cronies will not be coming back soon, nor will anybody be brought to
justice for the crimes.
Unfortunately, it means also that
nobody committing crimes today – stealing or murdering – have anything to fear,
especially if they have the right political connections.
And that is why, 16 years after the
murder of Ukrainska Pravda journalist Georgiy Gongadze, nobody is able to get a
conclusion for an investigation that has fingered ex-President Leonid Kuchma,
the father-in-law of YES conference founder Victor Pinchuk as the prime suspect.
Kuchma denies the allegations. But the case foreshadows what is likely to
happen to the investigation into the July 20 car bombing that killed Ukrainska
Pravda journalist Pavel Sheremet: It
will likely fail, because Ukraine’s criminal justice system is broken.
Don’t take my word for it, believe
the nation’s last two prime ministers – Volodymyr Groysman, the incumbent, and
Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the previous one.
Last year, BBC Hard Talk host
Stephen Sackur, who moderates panels for Pinchuk, asked Yatsenyuk to name a single “big fish” convicted of
corruption. He could not name a single one.
This year, in response to the same
question, Groysman also could not name a single case.
“You can’t catch a big fish with a
small, thin rod,” Groysman said.
The prime minister since April went
on to say that Ukraine had squandered
its chance in its first 25 years to create a strong and independent state with
well-functioning institutions.
“That chance has unfortunately has
been lost,” Groysman said, admitting that “we have a weak court, weak judiciary
and other challenges that require solutions.”
Yatsenyuk last year simply begged
off responsibility, saying he has no control over judges or prosecutors.
But what is missing from both prime
ministers is leadership. If the current system is so broken and the “reforms”
are so distant and weak, why not do what other nations have done to combat
corruption?
It’s time to do what Guatemala has
done, which is to invest legal powers into special courts, investigators and
prosecutors overseen by competent professionals, foreign and domestic.
It’s time to borrow a page from
Romania and the Baltic nations, which faced Soviet-style (or Eastern Bloc)
corruption but managed to combat it.
It’s also time to borrow the
transparency and effectiveness of the Nordic countries in keeping crime low –
and those crimes that are committed – punished.
It’s also time to remove political
control over prosecutors, judges and police – they are not independent – and to
invest ordinary citizens with oversight powers, chiefly but not exclusively
through the establishment of a jury system.
But nobody was talking about any of
these ideas at Pinchuk’s forum.
While at least the prime ministers
have shown up the last two years, neither general
prosecutor – Viktor Shokin or Yuriy Lutsenko – refused to come.
Shokin, whose obstruction of
justice was well-chronicled before President Petro Poroshenko fired him in
March, would never be able to justify his actions in a public forum.
More was expected of Poroshenko
appointee Lutsenko, who came to power in May. But it appears that
Lutsenko was simply too afraid on Sept. 17 to be on the same panel as
anti-corruption crusader and member of parliament Sergii Leshchenko.
Lutsenko appeared at the conference
at 1 p.m., as another panel was holding an economic discussion.
Lutsenko also probably didn’t want
to sit next to Swedish economist Anders Aslund, who believes that all of
Ukraine’s prosecutors and judges should be fired and that the institutions be
rebuilt from scratch.
Leshchenko holds Poroshenko
responsible for the faltering anti-corruption fight and obstruction of justice.
“I think the main problem is the
lack of political will to fight corruption among the Ukrainian leadership. The
schemes surrounding state entities and ministers are not possible to implement
without protection of the top level,” Leshchenko said, fingering state enterprises as a big source
of corrupt riches for insiders at the expense of Ukrainains. “I believe that
the president is personally responsible for fight against corruption and 60
percent of society believes president is the responsible for fight against
corruption.”
A troika of forces gives Leshchenko his
optimism. He said the combined pressure of civil society, independent
journalists and Ukraine’s Western friends have been successful in pushing the
corrupt oligarchy to make some changes.
It was no wonder that, at the end
of the forum entitled “Fighting Corruption,” almost nobody in the room raised
their hands when Sackur asked them to do so if they believed that the
government is waging a credible and effective fight against corruption.
At this pace, it is more than
likely that – when the 14th annual YES conference roles around next year — Ukraine
will still not have punished any “big fish,” the Gongadze investigation will
still go on, the Sheremet murder will be unsolved and that the billions of
dollars stolen from Ukraine will not be returned.
