In the first public conflict inside the ruling party in parliament, President Volodymyr Zelensky and the leadership of the Servant of the People faction demanded on Oct. 22 that 11 of its lawmakers suspected of taking bribes submit to a lie detector test.
Eleven members of the party who sit on the parliament’s finance committee stand accused of accepting bribes of up to $30,000 each in exchange for abstaining from an Oct. 18 vote on a bill aimed at eliminating a notorious real estate corruption scheme. The bill was drafted by representatives of their own party.
The failed vote led Zelensky to instruct party leader David Arakhamia to subject the lawmakers to a polygraph test, according to the president’s statement and the Kyiv Post’s sources within the party.
The Servant of the People lawmakers who didn’t support the bill were: Iryna Allakhverdiyev, Olha Vasylevska-Smahliuk, Darya Volodina, Yuliya Didenko, Oleksandr Dubinsky, Viktoria Kinzburska, Oleksiy Kovaliov, Anna Kolisnyk, Oleksiy Leonov, Anastasiya Liashenko, Yevhen Petruniak.
Several of the 11 lawmakers said they are ready to take the test. Oleksandr Dubinsky said he can take the polygraph, but demanded the same from presidential office staff and lawmakers who have authored bills he sees as “scandalous and dubious.”
The leaders of Servant of the People initially said they will meet with the 11 lawmakers and consult with psychologists and criminologists before making the final decision regarding the polygraph, according to the party’s spokesperson, Yevheniya Kravchuk.
However, as the scandal escalated, Arakhamia and Dubinsky told the media that they will both take the lie detector test live on air on the evening of Oct. 23.
According to the Kyiv Post’s sources in the party, Arakhamia told lawmakers that those who fail the lie detector test will either be transferred to another committee or dismissed from parliament.
In a statement published on Oct. 23, Zelensky said that he wants all members of the committee to take a lie detector test.
“If this test establishes even the smallest likelihood that one of the lawmakers took money for the vote on the committee, then they should be dealt with by anti-corruption bodies,” Zelensky said. “And if suspicions are justified – we will say goodbye to such lawmakers.”
The Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office also started criminal proceedings to investigate whether any of the 11 lawmakers had taken a bribe. The penalty for such an offense is imprisonment from eight to 12 years and deprivation of the right to hold some public positions for three years.
A source in the Servant of the People party told the Kyiv Post on condition of anonymity that they were offered a $30,000 bribe from people who said they represented a lawmaker Anton Yatsenko. The source also said that lawmakers from the Voice (Holos) party serving on the committee were offered smaller bribes from Yatsenko’s people to abstain from voting on the bill that would eliminate the real estate scheme.
The spokesperson for the Voice Yarema Dukh and the party’s lawmaker on the finance committee Yaroslav Zhelezniak both said that they don’t have any information about their members being offered bribes for voting a certain way on the committee.
“Considering the composition of our faction, one has to be very slow-witted to approach any of us with such proposals. I don’t think there are any doubts about the integrity of our faction and principled position on the matter (eliminating the corruption scheme), given that three or four members of our faction authored the bill,” Zhelezniak told the Kyiv Post.
Yatsenko denies he offered anyone bribes, saying it’s all “an absolute schizoid delirium and absurdity.” He says he never gave any bribes to lawmakers and doesn’t have representatives who would.
“It’s another lie. If the source was offered something, he should have gone, ran to NABU (the National Anti-Corruption Bureau) or the Prosecutor’s office, I don’t know.”
Scheme in question
Under the scheme, Ukrainians pay more than Hr 1 million ($40,258) each day when registering real estate transactions as fees to one of four broker firms or “platforms” with exclusive licenses to input data about property valuation into a state registry.
Three of these companies, often referred to by the media and lawmakers as “Yatsenko’s platforms” are connected to Yatsenko through partners from his former businesses, according to Nashi Groshi investigative journalists. The bill that the lawmakers failed to support aimed to eliminate the platforms.
Yatsenko says that he doesn’t have any “platforms” involved in the corruption schemes and doesn’t profit from them.
“I don’t give a hoot about that vote, because I don’t have any interests in that sphere. I don’t do any business. I’m a people’s deputy,” he told the Kyiv Post, using a common Ukrainian term for a lawmaker.
Yatsenko has links to billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. He was a member of the Revival (Vidrodzhennia) party in the previous parliament, which Kolomoisky publically said he supported. Yatsenko is now a lawmaker with For the Future (Za Maybutnie), a group that includes Kolomoisky’s associate Ihor Palytsia and members of UKROP, a party Kolomoisky financially supported and held a leadership position in.
Yatsenko denies connections to Kolomoisky and says that the oligarch doesn’t have influence over For the Future. Yatsenko says he and Kolomoisky don’t have any common interests.
Accused lawmaker: ‘Nobody gave us instructions’
Two of the 11 lawmakers from Servant of the People who abstained from voting on the bill that would eliminate the so-called “Yatsenko’s platforms” are Dubinsky and Vasylevska-Smahliuk, both former journalists at Kolomoisky’s 1+1 TV channel. The are often labeled as “Kolomoisky’s people.”
Vasylevska-Smahliuk says that she sees no sense in denying that she is connected to Kolomoisky, because she has had some ties with him for over 10 years. But she says that nobody gave her any instructions on how to vote, especially not Kolomoisky, for whom “Yatsenko’s platforms are too small an issue.”
She says she abstained from voting because she wanted the bill to be revised to include the elimination of platforms that work with ProZorro, the state electronic procurement system. These privately operated intermediaries receive information from ProZorro about tenders to find buyers, sellers and contractors and receive a percentage of sales from state procurement.
“I abstained from any voting because, by eliminating Yatsenko’s platforms, we won’t be able to eliminate ProZorro platforms. In our faction we have ProZorro representatives and even people who founded companies that sell state and municipal real estate under ProZorro. And they are not interested in eliminating these straw companies at all,” Vasylevska-Smahliuk told the Kyiv Post.
But Andriy Motovylovets, a lawmaker with the Servant of the People and a former deputy director of ProZorro’s auction platform, ProZorro.Sale, says that platforms on ProZorro create competition, which helps the state maximize profits on purchases and sales. Meanwhile, Yatsenko’s platforms were made only to make its owners richer, he says.
“It’s beneficial for the state to have ProZorro platforms. They create a demand which leads to a rise in the prices on what the state sells. In state procurement, ProZorro platforms’ competition leads to a decrease in prices on what the state buys,” Motovylovets says. “And there is no need for platforms in real estate evaluation – there should be only an office of the real estate evaluator.”
ProZorro’s official launch in 2016 was broadly viewed as a victory for increased transparency in state procurement. The platform was a collaborative project involving the nonprofit organization Transparency International Ukraine, government, civil society and the business community.
Internal feud?
In what appeared to be another sign of distrust to the Servant of the People’s lawmakers in the finance committee, the head of the party and speaker of the parliament Dmytro Razumkov has transferred the development of another important bill from the finance committee to the economic policy committee in parliament.
The bill, endorsed by Zelensky, aims to develop a legal framework for the gambling business. Under Zelensky’s vision, gambling halls would function only in five-star hotels, threatening the existence of the highly-profitable small gambling halls that operate in Ukraine today, poorly disguised as lotteries.
