Venediktova launches political attack against specialized anti-corruption prosecution

Prosecutor General of Ukraine Iryna Venediktova
launched a political attack campaign on May 26 against the Specialized
Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, a body that has retained relative
independence from the President’s Office. She accused the office of inactivity
in the two months since she held a late March meeting with Nazar Kholodnytskiy,
the head of the specialized prosecutor’s office, and Artem Sytnyk, the head of
the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, which conducts investigations for the
specialized office’s cases. Both bodies were created under the Poroshenko
administration as requirements for IMF loans to have independent bodies to address
corruption.

“Notices of suspicion have been issued to high-ranking
officials in ongoing and highly publicized cases going back two, three or even
four years, yet the investigations have yet to be completed, the guilty haven’t
been brought to justice and many millions in damages haven’t been compensated,”
Venediktova said in a video announcement that day. She mentioned several
high-profile cases that were never brought to trial, including the alleged
illegal seizure of land in suburban Kyiv by former Deputy Prosecutor General
Renat Kuzmin.

While the National Anti-Corruption Bureau questioned
more than 100 people in Kuzmin’s case and gathered 30 items of evidence,
prosecutors at the specialized office haven’t conducted any investigation or
legal procedure for six months, she said. As a result, the case was closed,
millions in losses to the state haven’t been returned, no land has been
returned, and Kuzmin has eluded punishment, she said, also strangely implying
his guilt, in violation of her own ethics. She concluded her statement by
vowing to address in some way the specialized prosecution’s inactivity, without
specifying how.

In response to the accusations, the specialized
prosecutor’s office released a statement on May 27 accusing Venediktova of inactivity,
criticizing her for weakening the authority of law enforcement bodies and
alleging Ukraine’s political elite is trying to gain control of the office for
its own aims. The work of the two accused bodies has undermined billions of
hryvnias worth of illegal schemes fields of energy, industry, and mining, the
statement said, with thousands of cases awaiting review at the anti-corruption
court. “We have information and well understand the processes launched by the
so-called political elites in reordering our activity under certain goals that
don’t comply with the tasks of criminal justice,” the statement said. “In light
of this, we firmly call on the prosecutor general not to be a part of these
processes, not to pressure the prosecutors of the Specialized Anti-Corruption
Prosecutor’s Office and not to embarrass the law enforcement system.”

Zenon Zawada: Rather than
being well-intentioned criticism by Venediktova, this is strictly a political
attack that is aimed at the most vulnerable body of what was supposed to be
Ukraine’s independent justice system. With this campaign, the Zelensky
administration is intentionally discrediting the IMF’s intention of
implementing some minimal degree of rule of law. Certainly, high-ranking
officials have yet to face full court trials that reach conviction, which is a
big problem for rule of law. That’s even after the launch of the independent
High Anti-Corruption Court in April 2019. Venediktova’s targets certainly bear
part of the blame in their shortcomings. But she doesn’t cite any
accomplishments to balance her assessment, or offer any solutions.

The elites cited by Kholodnytskiy who are interested
in this campaign fall into two parties that largely overlap each other. The
first is the oligarchs and their associates, particularly Ihor Kolomoisky, who
want to avoid the developing criminal prosecution of their alleged crimes. The
second interested party is pro-Russian forces, who want to discredit the
Ukrainian government and institutions in the eyes of Western authorities. If
these forces can’t control the independent bodies (the anti-corruption bureau,
prosecutor’s office and the independent court), then they want their influence
minimized to the fullest.

Former Foreign Affairs Minister Pavlo Klimkin
warned in an interview broadcast yesterday that Western powers may decide to
resolve increasingly their conflict with Russia without Ukraine’s involvement.
We believe that will be increasingly possible with such developments as
Western-backed institutions being discredited and confidential conversations between
high-ranking officials are wiretapped and leaked. Western politicians will be even more wary of
Ukraine if related criminal cases interefere in their own political standing at
home. These are all recent developments that have further strained the Zelensky
administration’s with the West.