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Eastern Europe
March 2, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 20
only four out of 12 scheduled IMF payments and
it looks increasingly likely it will not receive any more money at all until the ACC is established. For Sytnyk, the inability to capitalise on the bureau’s investigations has direct consequences: “It’s a big hit to the morale of our detectives,” he says. “They work, they work, they work, bring a case to the court, and nothing happens.” In a tired voice, Sytnyk alternates between praise for his “small but motivated team” and pessimism over the political situation.
Sytnyk, who comes over as a somewhat reluctant director, combines experience as a former head of investigations in the Kyiv regional prosecutor's office and apparent honesty: he resigned from his old job in 2011 after denouncing the “criminalisa- tion of law enforcement agencies” under former president Viktor Yanukovych (according to his official biography). He was appointed director of NABU in April 2015.
Since then, as Ukrainian authorities have appeared less and less enthusiastic about the monumental task of tackling corruption, NABU has become a poster child of what reforms should look like for Ukraine’s Western backers as well
as for the country’s civil society – if not the only, then the most visible, success in Ukraine’s half- hearted fight against corruption.
“At the same time NABU was created, a big reform of the prosecutor general and of the police were also launched,” says Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of the NGO Anti-Corruption Action Centre. “Both failed. But NABU succeeded, partly because it’s a parallel structure built from scratch.”
NABU earned that backing in part thanks to a series of high-profile investigations which, Sytnyk says, “showed NABU is an independent organ not afraid to investigate cases of corruption. It's a first in the history of Ukraine.”
The agency sprang to international prominence after it indicted its first big fish, Roman Nasirov,
the head of the State Fiscal Service and a
close friend of Poroshenko, in March 2017. The indictment was the first time a senior active politician from the government’s inner circles
had been pulled up on corruption charges. Nasirov is accused of diverting some $75mn while restructuring tax debts. He denies the charges.
“Ukraine’s justice system is on trial,” wrote bne IntelliNews columnist Katya Kruk at the time, but unfortunately it has failed the test. Nasirov’s wife posted bail of over $3mn and while the case was supposed to go to trial last August, as of the time of writing nothing has happened.
The workload to close a single case involving a senior government official is considerable, and the sheer number of lower level officials that are also on the take multiplies it. But with only 700 employees (the maximum number set by law), NABU is a minuscule agency compared to the rest of Ukraine’s massive law enforcement institutions.
It’s easy to see this at the agency’s Kyiv office: while there’s a regular flow of NABU agents in civilian clothes near the entrance, passing men in military uniform who carry troves of documents, most of the building seems almost eerily empty.
Still, NABU’s impact has been real and its investigations have sent shockwaves through the system. In the last year, amongst the other big fish that have come under NABU’s scrutiny are Lieutenant General Igor Pavlovsky, a deputy defence minister, who has been accused of embezzlement, and the son of Arsen Avakov, the powerful interior minister, who was briefly arrested for his involvement in the “backpack case” – a scheme in which a businessman close to Oleksandr Avakov allegedly sold UAH14m ($520,000) worth of backpacks to the Ukrainian military at an inflated price.
The cases against Avakov’s son and Igor Pavlovsky “united the Ukrainian political elite against NABU”, says Kaleniuk. When Nasirov was held
in jail over the weekend before his arraignment