Hacked PR documents accelerate political war

Prosecutors are building a case against Hryhoriy Nemyria, who served as deputy prime minister under imprisoned former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, for allegedly using offshore vehicles to pay a British public relations agency to provide services to her Batkivshchyna Party.

Ukraine’s election law forbids outside financing of political parties or campaigns.

Nemyria, through his lawyer Mykola Tytarenko, has categorically denied any wrongdoing.

Authorities are basing their case on a website called Nemyrialeaks.com, which appeared in November, and which purportedly contains internal documents obtained from Ridge Consulting for the period 2006 to 2011 during and after Tymoshenko’s failed presidential bid.

The data trove allegedly includes billing information and expense reports that prosecutors believe provide evidence of financing from offshore zones to the political structures of opposition leader Tymoshenko.

Prosecutors are looking into whether companies registered in offshore zones made deposits into accounts that were set up to pay for public relations services, according to Renat Kuzmin, the deputy prosecutor general of Ukraine. “If this information is confirmed, then that means that the political force was financed in violation of Ukraine’s current legislation,” Kuzmin said in mid-December.

However, Ukrainian election watchdogs and political consultants say the use of offshore vehicles to finance political parties and campaigns is a widespread practice used by all sides.

Unlimited and nontransparent campaign financing was also a key concern mentioned in the final report on Ukraine’s parliamentary election released on Jan. 3 by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

“The law does not sufficiently provide for transparency of party funding, for full disclosure of sources and amounts of campaign expenditure, or for proportionate and dissuasive sanctions for violations of campaign funding provisions,” read the OSCE report. “In addition, the absence of public campaign financing and the lack of spending limits caused many contestants to rely on the support of wealthy individuals or business interests.”

Among those directly implicated is Nemyria, Tymoshenko’s top foreign policy adviser, who is alleged to have served as the main conduit between offshore bank accounts and Ridge Consulting. Nemyria is consistently named as the client in the dozens of Ridge Consulting invoices revealed on Nemyrialeaks.
Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna Party says that Nemyrialeaks is merely the latest tactic in a steady campaign being conducted by the ruling Party of Regions to destroy the political party.

Moreover, another website has recently surfaced that purportedly includes the emails of Eugenia Tymoshenko, the ex-prime minister’s daughter. The website zhuzhaleaks.com shows written exchanges between Eugenia Tymoshenko and personal contacts, including her ex-husband Sean Carr and numerous associates involved in releasing her mother from prison, including Neil Pattie of Ridge Consulting, and Jim Slattery, a six-term U.S. congressman and Washington, D.C. lobbyist.

Nemyria’s lawyer added that his client has fully cooperated with authorities in their probe.

“Kuzmin says that Nemyria is evading questioning at the Prosecutor General’s Office,” Ukraine General Newswire quoted Tytarenko on Dec. 27. “This allegation is untrue, because Nemyria came to the Prosecutor’s General Office for questioning as soon as he received the notification in a legal way.”

An indication of Nemyrialeaks’ state sponsorship is the widespread attention state-controlled press has paid the issue, including aggressive promotion by pro-government blogger and talking head Viacheslav Pikhovshek, an ally of the administration of President Viktor Yanukovych.

“This site is from the hands of Bankova technologists and is obviously oriented towards discrediting Batkivshchyna,” said Otar Dovzhenko, a Lviv-based media watchdog and political blogger.

It remains unknown who is responsible for the Nemyrialeaks site and how the alleged documents were obtained from Ridge Consulting, which has yet to confirm or deny their validity.

However, in an interview with state news agency Ukrinform in November, Ridge Consulting’s Pattie, whose name appears on billing information, said that he had worked for Batkivshchyna until October 2011.

In the same interview he said he was aware that some company documents related to Ridge Consulting and Batkivshchyna were made available to the press.

“I knew that certain documentation or information regarding accounts was made available on websites,” Pattie told Ukrinform. “I acted in accordance with the law and in accordance to standard practice. I have nothing to hide. I acted ethically.”

Taras Kuzio, a political scientist alleged in the Nemyrialeaks documents to have been paid by the Tymoshenko campaign for writing articles, indicated that at least some of the documents are legitimate when informing the Kyiv Post that some of them were stolen from Ridge Consulting.

“The stolen and doctored docs are part of this campaign by the Prosecutor General’s Office, a complete tool of Soviet-style political repression, now bent on closing the Batkivshchyna Party,” said Kuzio. “I understand that some of the information is accurate and some of it fictitious. What I do know is that the information was obtained illegally by a hacker from a British-based computer and is subject to a police criminal investigation in the UK.”

A Kyiv district court ruled in early December that Nemyria, a current member of parliament, was acting illegally, and required him to name the source of funding. The Prosecutor General’s Office then questioned Nemyria in mid-December. In remarks that day, Kuzmin estimated Nemyria handled $100 million in payments for public relations services.

Volodymyr Fesenko, board chairman of the Penta Center for Applied Political Research, noted that by smearing Nemyria, his lobbying efforts on behalf of Tymoshenko in the West will have been neutralized.
“Nemyria is the main driving force in conducting Tymoshenko’s defense in the West and entirely outplays his Party of Regions opponents in this field,” said Fesenko.

Elmar Brok of the European People’s Party, which has a partnership agreement with Batkivshchyna, came to Nemyria’s defense, stating that his prosecution will only dig the Ukrainian government in deeper disfavor with the EU and even undermine the potential signing of the Ukraine-EU Association Agreement in 2013.

Besides criminal prosecution of individuals, the investigation could result in Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna Party being denied official registration and being forced to reorganize, said Fesenko.

Yet that would only serve as the latest example of selective criminal prosecution given that the Party of Regions is widely known to have been financed from its offshore sources, said Oleksandr Paliy, a veteran political observer and author.

“The Party of Regions has existed thanks to its offshore savings, particularly in Cyprus, the source of most of Ukraine’s foreign direct investment where money is laundered then repatriated in avoidance of taxes,” he said. “I don’t exclude that Tymoshenko did something similar, but it’s simply ridiculous for the Party of Regions to pursue charges against her for that.”

In turn, the Batkivshchyna Party has urged the Prosecutor General’s Office to investigate the financing of the Party of Regions.

“I would advise [Kuzmin] to review the offshore accounts of Rinat Akhmetov, Boris Kolesnikov, Dmytro Firtash, as well as the accounts from where money is transferred to pay for his trips abroad with Party of Regions money,” said Serhiy Sobeliev, first deputy chair of the Batkivshchyna parliamentary faction, referring to businessmen widely considered to be financial sponsors of the Party of Regions.

‘Nemyrialeaks’ casts spotlight on PR war with paid opinion pieces

Among those alleged to have been exposed by the ‘Nemyrialeaks’ scandal has been Taras Kuzio, a fellow at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. who is among the world’s most prolific writers on contemporary Ukrainian politics.

Invoices allegedly issued by Ridge Consulting Ltd., a British public relations agency, that were sent to Hryhoriy Nemyria, former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s foreign policy adviser and current lawmaker, indicated that Kuzio was paid to write political articles, including opinion pieces, between  February 2010 and March 2011.

Separately, in company operating expense reports, Ridge Consulting allegedly made 21 payments to Kuzio from July 2009 to October 2011 totaling some $20,000 as a subcontractor.

During this time, leading English-language publications on Ukraine, including the Kyiv Post, published Kuzio’s writings on Ukrainian politics, which had been submitted under the guise of independent analysis from a scholar at an American university. In an invoice dated Feb. 11, 2010, Ridge Consulting allegedly released an opinion piece written under Kuzio’s name.

Kuzio declined to comment on the invoices, stating that documents appearing on Nemyrialeaks had been “stolen and forged.” He declined to comment on whether news publications had published the materials for which he was paid.

Yet he reportedly admitted to being paid by Ridge Consulting to write political articles when confronted in mid-November Ukrinform, a state news agency.

“Yes, I wrote materials, I wrote articles …,” Kuzio told Ukrinform, which published the comments in a Nov. 13 article. “I wrote two articles a month and that’s all … on elections, on the political situation in Ukraine.”

He claimed he was acting as a journalist when submitting the materials.

Yet Kuzio has spent much of the last decade identifying himself as an academic, not as a journalist.
“Why not?” he asked Ukrinform, regarding the receipt of payments to write political articles as a journalist. “I wrote what I wanted to.”

Editors, including at the Kyiv Post, had suspected Kuzio of getting paid by Tymoshenko because his opinion pieces were overwhelmingly in her favor. When confronted by numerous editors, including Kyiv Post chief editor Brian Bonner, Kuzio denied working for Tymoshenko’s political campaign.

Bonner said that the newspaper asks all contributors to disclose any potential conflicts of interests in the taglines that accompany their opinion pieces, but noted it is hard to prove who is on whose payroll.
He said that the newspaper discontinues publication of opinion pieces if editors become convinced that the writer is not disclosing major conflicts of interest. For example, Bonner said he stopped publication of opinions written by American Anthony Salvia, director of the Ukrainian Institute in America, because Salvia refused to disclose the organization’s financial backers.

“That refusal, combined with his almost hagiographic writings in favor of President Viktor Yanukovych, led me to conclude he is working for someone with the pro-presidential Party of Regions,” Bonner said. “The issue is disclosure, not political alliances. We regularly publish opinions from government and Party of Regions officials, as well as opposition politicians. But the reader knows what they are getting in those cases.”

That Ridge Consulting allegedly served as one of Kuzio’s employers reveals a tactic often used in politics, observers said, which involves using an intermediary agent to commission public relations materials that enables the seemingly independent writer or speaker to deny any links to the ultimate client.

Indeed, leaders in the Party of Regions have turned to public relations firms at a rate far exceeding the Batkivshchyna Party and its members, including Global Communications, Burston Marsteller hired by Rinat Akhmetov and APCO hired by Oleksandr Feldman, among others.

And according to alleged emails by Washington, D.C. lobbyist Jim Slattery made available on Zhuzhaleaks.com, APCO, Skadden and Podesta Group were named as public affairs companies hired by the Party of Regions do work for them.

Zenon Zawada, a former chief editor of the Kyiv Post, is a freelance journalist in Kyiv.