Watch the two-day “Democracy in Action: Zero Corruption Conference in English: Day 1 and Day 2.
President Volodymyr Zelensky was upbeat on fighting corruption at the Democracy in Action: Zero Corruption conference on June 7, boasting about what he believes to be his achievements.
Specifically, he listed judicial reform, de-oligarchization and the functioning of anti-corruption institutions. “In my election program I declared an ambitious goal: not just fighting corruption but a victory over it,” Zelensky said.
Yet Zelensky’s boasts do not always stand up to scrutiny. Panelists at the conference referred to cases when Zelensky’s ruling 243-member party, his Cabinet, his loyal prosecutor general and top officials at the President’s Office do their best to sabotage anti-corruption cases.
The President’s Office did not respond to requests for comment.
The Democracy in Action: Zero Corruption conference was held on June 7-8. It covered a broad range of issues, including democratic transition, sanctions, de-oligarchization, anti-corruption efforts, and countering fake news and propaganda.
The forum was created as a non-oligarchic alternative to the Yalta European Strategy, an annual conference founded by oligarch Victor Pinchuk.
The organizers include the Anti-Corruption Action Center and other civil society groups.
Tatarov case
A landmark litmus test for Zelensky’s tolerance for corruption was the case against his deputy chief of staff Oleh Tatarov, who was charged in December with bribery and denies the accusations.
“When certain cases against top officials were moving towards a decision at the High Anti-Corruption Court (HACC), there were attempts to take the cases away from the NABU through Kyiv’s Pechersk District Court in order to make it impossible for these cases to result in HACC verdicts,” NABU chief Artem Sytnyk said at the Democracy in Action conference in a veiled reference to the Tatarov case. “This is an intentional violation of the law in an effort to save people who have political influence on the judiciary.”
Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova, a Zelensky protégé, blocked the charges against Tatarov in December 2020 by replacing the group of prosecutors in the Tatarov case twice. Venediktova, who denied the accusations of sabotage, then transferred the case from the NABU to the politically controllable Security Service of Ukraine using a Pechersk Court ruling.
In February, Kyiv’s Shevchenkivsky Court refused to extend the Tatarov investigation, and Venediktova’s prosecutors effectively killed it by missing the deadline for sending it to trial.
“The people who illegally used this mechanism have so far resolved their problems,” Sytnyk said. “The cases were taken away from the NABU and given to other agencies that stopped these investigations.”
Attack on NABU
Since February, the Cabinet, which was selected by Zelensky’s party, and lawmakers from the party submitted three bills seeking to fire Sytnyk ahead of schedule. The latest bill was passed by parliament in the first reading in May.
Anti-corruption activists see the efforts to fire Sytnyk as Zelensky’s reaction to the Tatarov case and a NABU investigation into embezzlement during COVID-19 vaccine purchases.
The bills ostensibly seek to bring legislation in line with the controversial Constitutional Court rulings that canceled the decree on Sytnyk’s appointment and struck down clauses of the NABU law that give the president a role in appointing the head of the bureau in 2020.
“When the NABU started going after top officials of the incumbent government, (the Constitutional Court adopted) a decision to cancel the NABU chief’s appointment,” Sytnyk said.
Karen Greenaway, a former agent of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations, agreed with this assessment.
“Sytnyk spends as much time fighting off these daily attacks on his organization as (NABU officials) spend on their job as investigators,” she said at the conference.
Judicial reform
Another litmus test for anti-corruption efforts is judicial reform, which has stalled ever since Zelensky announced it in 2019.
Gianni Buquicchio, head of the European Commission for Democracy through Law (the Venice Commission), criticized Ukraine’s two main judicial reform bills at the conference. He called for a crucial role for foreign experts in the reform.
The bills, which have been passed in the first reading, aim to reform the judiciary’s two discredited governing bodies, the High Council of Justice and the High Qualification Commission of Judges. Anti-corruption activists and legal experts have criticized both bills, saying they would fail to reform the courts, nullify foreign experts’ role in judicial reform and break Ukraine’s commitments to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
“The bill (on the High Qualification Commission) does not meet the Venice Commission recommendations and we do not support it,” Buquicchio said. “The High Council of Justice needs to be vetted before it is entrusted with the setting up of the High Qualification Commission. This is imperative or judicial reform will be doomed.”
Meanwhile, in April Zelensky submitted a bill to liquidate the notorious Kyiv District Administrative Court and marked it as urgent. The court is headed by Pavlo Vovk, a suspect in corruption cases who is regarded by civil society as the symbol of lawlessness in Ukraine.
However, the bill has been effectively blocked by parliament’s legal policy committee, headed by Andriy Kostin from Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, according to the Anti-Corruption Action Center and DEJURE, a legal think-tank. Kostin did not respond to requests for comment.
Asset disclosure
The situation with asset declarations for officials – a key pillar of the anti-corruption infrastructure – has also faced obstacles during Zelensky’s tenure.
In October the Constitutional Court eliminated penalties for lying in declarations and destroyed the entire asset declaration system by depriving the National Agency for Preventing Corruption (NAPC), which is tasked with checking declarations, of most of its powers.
“I was categorically against the Constitutional Court decision,” Zelensky said at the conference. “We made sure that anti-corruption agencies resumed their functioning and restored asset declarations.”
Zelensky suspended Constitutional Court Chairman Oleksander Tupytsky in December and fired him in March, using corruption charges against him as justification.
In December parliament, in which Zelensky’s Servant of the People party has a constitutional majority, passed a bill restoring penalties for lying in asset declarations. However, the bill helped corrupt officials by imposing extremely mild penalties — fines, community service and restrictions on freedom that do not include imprisonment.
Later Zelensky submitted another bill to reinstate jail terms for lying in asset declarations.
On June 3, parliament approved the second reading of the bill but inserted an amendment that allows officials not to declare the assets of their relatives. Vitaly Shabunin, head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center’s executive board, believes this amendment effectively destroys the asset declaration system.
“These initiatives met resistance from many parties,” Zelensky said in an apparent reference to his own party, which inserted the amendment. “I will veto this bill. I believe it must envisage jail sentences (for lies in asset declarations).”
Buquicchio said at the conference that the Venice Commission does not support the amendments on relatives and mild penalties and welcomed Zelensky’s plans to veto the latest bill.
The controversial amendment on relatives was pushed by Verkhovna Rada speaker Dmytro Razumkov, Shabunin told the Kyiv Post. But if parliament fails to restore jail terms by the end of the current parliamentary session in July, this will mean Zelensky himself does not want it to be restored, he added. Razumkov did not respond to requests for comment.
Anti-corruption prosecutor
Nor has Ukraine escaped problems with selecting the chief anti-corruption prosecutor, who oversees NABU cases. The commission that will choose the chief anti-corruption prosecutor consists of four foreign experts and seven pro-government members delegated by parliament.
“The selection has continued for almost a year, and after certain decisions made on June 4 the selection halted, and it’s very difficult to forecast when this selection will be completed,” Sytnyk said at the conference.
On June 4, foreign experts on the selection panel vetoed Kostin from Zelensky’s party because he does not meet political neutrality criteria. Kostin was seen by anti-corruption activists as the government’s main candidate for the job of the anti-corruption prosecutor.
Since Kostin was vetoed, pro-government members on the selection panel have essentially suspended the selection by blocking panel meetings.
Zelensky’s deputy chief of staff Tatarov, a corruption suspect, essentially handpicked the members of the selection panel, according to a May 13 report by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Schemes investigative show. Numerous members of the selection panel either know Tatarov or are connected to him, Schemes reported.
“Tatarov personally made sure that Kostin should pass to the next stage. The President’s Office was vetoing everyone whom they don’t like (through pro-government panel members),” Shabunin said. “Now their plan is to suspend the selection, win time and then cancel it through a court decision.”
De-oligarchization
As part of his stated goal of fighting corruption, Zelensky on June 2 submitted a de-oligarchization bill to the Verkhovna Rada.
Figures who are officially recognized as oligarchs will be banned from donating directly or indirectly to political parties and taking part in the privatization of state assets, according to the bill.
But so far no major oligarchs have been charged in Ukraine for any crimes.
“(Oligarch Ihor) Kolomoisky is not charged with any crime or convicted with any crime,” the Kyiv Post’s editor-in-chief Brian Bonner, who moderated the panel on oligarchs, said at the conference. “It’s hard to take any of this seriously and I don’t know how law enforcement can stop the flow when he’s not convicted of anything. Secondly, there have been no convictions of anybody for financial crimes or even top murders in Ukraine.”
Ex-FBI agent Greenaway argued that “Kolomoisky and individuals like him have had the ability for the last 20 years to directly influence how Ukrainian law enforcement does their job through collusive and corrupt activity.”
Another problem is Ukrainian oligarchs’ “Western enablers.”
Oligarchs have “enablers – Western professionals that helped the oligarchs move their money, hide their money and then spend their money wherever they want however they want,” Casey Michel, a U.S. journalist and author of a book on oligarchs, said at the conference.
Klitschko’s view
Meanwhile, in May the authorities launched a crackdown on graft at Kyiv city hall. In the span of three days, the State Fiscal Service and Kyiv’s prosecutor’s office conducted 60 searches for alleged corruption, tax evasion, abuse of office and fraud among Kyiv city officials. A total of 11 people were charged as a result.
But Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko argued that his own office had transferred the cases to law enforcement agencies a long time ago but now the authorities were trying to turn it against him and launch a political vendetta.
“I interpret this as political pressure using the slogan of fighting corruption,” Klitschko said at the conference. “When officials at high government offices talk for hours about how to attack mayors, this is political corruption.”
