Page 13 - UKRRptFeb24

Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) were set up, although the third element, the independent Anti-Corruption Court (ACC) was only created in the same week Zelenskiy beat Poroshenko in the presidential elections.
The appearance of independent investigators, entirely autonomous from the government, under Poroshenko made little difference. NABU arrested Roman Nasirov, the government’s financial controller and Poroshenko's right-hand man, charging him with embezzling millions of dollars in March 2017.
At the time, Nasirov’s arrest was hailed as the first big fish ever to be hooked by the law enforcement agencies and the courthouse was surrounded by demonstrators to make sure Nasirov didn’t get away over the weekend. But after his wife appeared on the Monday with a million dollars in cash to post bail, he was released and never tried. Indeed, he later ran against Zelenskiy in the 2019 presidential race. Despite working for nearly a decade, NABU has never managed to convict a single high-level politician for corruption, although more recently lower level officials are starting to be arrested and sent to jail.
Is Zelenskiy corrupt?
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, said British historian Lord Acton, and Zelenskiy has been accused of graft.
His name came up in the Panama Papers (as did Poroshenko’s), a leak of offshore holding companies that raised suspicions. Zelenskiy is a wealthy man, estimated to be worth some $44mn at the time of the leak.
But looking at the details a little more closely and his wealth seems to be legitimate. Although $44mn is a huge sum by ordinary Ukrainian standards, Zelenskiy was a highly successful comedian and owner of an equally successful TV production company that syndicated its shows in the cash-rich Russian market. In this context, $44mn is a relatively modest sum and the fact that he chose to keep some of his wealth in offshore companies and not all in a Ukrainian bank is entirely normal.
More recently, Zelenskiy was accused of skimming millions of dollars off fuel acquisition allocations made by international donors – similar in nature to the defence ministries artillery shell scam -- but no solid evidence has been presented and the rumour is as likely to be Russian disinformation as true.
In his mandatory declaration of income and assets, released on January 28, Zelenskiy declared an income of $285,198 in 2021, owns seven apartments and two cars, a Range Rover and a Mercedes – hardly oligarch levels of opulence.
Unsure of himself in his first two years in office, since the war started almost no one in Ukraine doubts his courage and patriotism in the face of the Russian invasion. He summed up this defiance with a now legendary video post in the first days of the war in the streets outside the president’s on Bankova in central Kyiv: “We’re here,” he exclaimed surrounded by all the leading ministers in his cabinet to reassure the people he was remaining in the centre of the fight against Russia.
To Zelenskiy’s credit he had already started to clean out the rot in the Defence
13 UKRAINE Country Report February 2024 www.intellinews.com