Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko on May 24 presented a report on his performance since his appointment a year ago, while at the same time, around the country, his subordinates launched a large-scale anti-corruption raid against ex-top tax officials.
Lutsenko presented the raid as a major achievement in the corruption case against ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s Tax and Revenue Minister Oleksandr Klymenko. But his critics dismissed it as a public relations stunt intended to accompany his report in the Verkhovna Rada.
As news of the raid broke, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said that 454 searches were taking place, and 22 suspects in the Klymenko case had been arrested.
These include Hennady Kozak, an ex-deputy head of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast’s tax office; Stanyslav Denisyuk, an ex-head of Kharkiv Oblast’s tax office; Oleksandr Antipov, an ex-head of Luhansk Oblast’s tax office and an aide to Oleh Nedava, a lawmaker from President Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc, and Serhiy Shinkarenko, an ex-head of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast’s tax office.
The investigators found $3.8 million in cash while arresting Antipov, Avakov said.
Ukraine’s Chief Military Prosecutor Anatoly Matios said that the arrests had been made thanks to the testimony of State Fiscal Service Chief Roman Nasirov, who was arrested in a graft case by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau in March.
The raid comes as Lutsenko is being accused of helping tax officials involved in the Klymenko case escape punishment for political reasons.
These include Lyudmila Demchenko, head of the State Fiscal Service’s Kyiv branch, and Viktor Dvornikov, a former deputy head of Kyiv’s Pechersk District tax office and an advisor to Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko. Demchenko and Dvornikov were not among those arrested on May 24.
Yanukovych cases
Lutsenko said that after a court ruling in the ongoing high treason case against Yanukovych is issued, a second case – against Yanukovych’s alleged crackdown on and murder of EuroMaidan protesters in 2014 – would be immediately sent to trial.
He also claimed that his agency cannot prosecute judges of the Constitutional Court who are being investigated in the usurpation of power case against Yanukovych, because judges cannot be prosecuted for issuing rulings. Lawyers Vitaly Tytych and Roman Maselko and former judge Mykhailo Zhernakov dismissed this explanation as nonsense, saying that judges can indeed be prosecuted for making unlawful rulings.
Under the Ukrainian Constitution, “a judge cannot be held responsible for a ruling that he passed, except (in the case of) the committing of a crime or infraction.”
Judges of the Constitutional Court received a $6 million bribe from the Party of Regions, according to the party’s alleged accounting ledger published last year. However, Poroshenko and the Verkhovna Rada have so far refused to replace them.
Commenting on a crackdown on activists in Dnipro on May 9, Lutsenko said that prosecutors had identified the Opposition Bloc, including lawmaker Oleksandr Vilkul and Yanukovych’s Infrastructure Minister Borys Kolesnikov, as the organizers of pro-government thugs, or titushki, who participated in the assault.
The thugs and riot police attacked nationalist activists and Ukrainian veterans of Russia’s war against Ukraine at a protest on May 9. The police officers and titushki beat the activists with batons and kicked them.
Incumbent corruption
Talking about incumbent officials’ alleged corruption, Lutsenko said he had not signed motions to strip Radical Party lawmaker Andriy Lozovoy and People’s Front lawmaker Yevhen Deidei of their immunity because he had found alleged “errors” in the motions. Based on their asset declarations, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau is investigating Deidei on suspicion of unlawful enrichment, while the bureau and the Prosecutor General’s Office are investigating Lozovoy on the same grounds.
However, Lutsenko’s critics saw his statement as a sign of his reluctance to prosecute Deidei and Lozovoy for political reasons.
Lutsenko also said he would submit a motion to strip Hennady Bobov, a lawmaker from the Vidrodzhennya faction, of immunity. He said Bobov had offered to pay over $1 million in unpaid taxes as part of a plea bargain.
His critics were not impressed.
“A modern indulgence from Lutsenko: pay $1 million to the budget and walk free,” Samopomich party lawmaker Viktoria Voytsitska wrote on Facebook. “A precedent has been created due to horse-trading with the lawmaker.”
Lutsenko also surprised his audience in parliament by saying that not a single one among the other lawmakers checked by prosecutors and the State Fiscal Service had violated the law in their asset declarations.
“We and the State Fiscal Service have checked 35 people present in this hall,” he said. “They can sleep calmly because their declarations are in line with their documents.”
Anti-corruption bureau
Lutsenko mentioned that the Prosecutor General’s Office had opened a criminal investigation against Gizo Uglava, a deputy chief of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and an ally of ex-Odesa Oblast Governor Mikheil Saakashvili, accusing him of hiding his Georgian citizenship and tax evasion.
Uglava denied the accusations, and interpreted the case as pressure on the anti-graft bureau as part of the authorities’ efforts to restrict or destroy Ukraine’s only independent law enforcement agency. The bureau started a criminal investigation against prosecutors on suspicion that they had falsified the Uglava case.
Meanwhile, the Prosecutor General’s Office on May 24 charged Odesa-based businessman Oleksandr Hranovsky, who is also allegedly allied with Saakashvili, with tax evasion. He should not be confused with his namesake Oleksandr Hranovsky, a lawmaker and gray cardinal of Poroshenko.
Lutsenko also spoke against the creation of a special anti-corruption court, calling instead for creating an anti-corruption unit staffed with “new people” inside the Supreme Court.
Civic activists and Ukraine’s Western partners have called for the creation of an anti-corruption court staffed with independent and competent judges to try graft cases. This is seen as a solution to the problem of Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt and politicized judiciary.
However, the authorities, including Poroshenko, have effectively rejected the idea.
E-declarations
Apart from the anti-graft agency, Lutsenko also lashed out at another entity involved in a conflict with the authorities, software development firm Miranda. Critics argue that the authorities have used Miranda, which developed the electronic asset declaration system for officials, as a convenient scapegoat for their efforts to sabotage and ruin the system.
Lutsenko claimed that Yuriy Novikov, the CEO of Miranda, had embezzled funds allocated for the development of the e-declaration system by Danish authorities through the United Nations Development Program. He said that Novikov had delegated software development functions to Ukrainian students.
Novikov denied the accusations. “Such a statement by the prosecutor general proves the investigators’ prejudice and lack of objectivity and creates conditions for pressure on the judiciary in order to obtain rulings favorable to the Prosecutor General’s Office,” he said.
The National Agency for Preventing Corruption has so far failed to complete a single check of incumbent officials’ asset declarations since the system was launched in September.
Prosecution reform
Lutsenko also claimed that he had managed to reform the prosecution service by holding transparent competitions for about 600 job openings last year. He said that 82 percent of the winners were from outside the prosecutorial system.
Andriy Sliusar, an expert at the Reanimation Package of Reforms, questioned the success of Lutsenko’s alleged prosecutorial reform, arguing that the 82 percent of the new prosecutors were likely to be graduates from law universities, not experienced lawyers.
The competitions were held mostly for minor rank-and-file jobs, included only tests, as opposed to interviews, and did not involve civil society, he said.
Moreover, Lutsenko has failed to hold transparent competitions for top nationwide and regional jobs at the Prosecutor General’s Office, Sliusar added.
Meanwhile, in April prosecutors elected their self-regulating bodies. Lutsenko’s opponents argue that these bodies, which will have a right to authorize or veto any appointment or dismissal, will entrench the current prosecutorial regime and bury any attempts at reform.
A prosecution reform carried out by Lutsenko’s predecessor Viktor Shokin in 2015 was seen as a failure, with 84 top local prosecutors keeping their jobs as a result of a competition.
