The National Bureau of Anti-corruption Investigations will not inspect businesses

The Bureau will inspect MPs' briefcases as well

Photo: Konstantin Melnitsky

This week the bill on creating the National Bureau of Anti-corruption Investigations (NBAI) will be submitted to the Verkhovna Rada. This will be a special agency responsible for the fight against corruption in the higher bodies of the government. The authors of this new bill say they will exclude the inspection of private businesses from the bureau’s authorities. This norm has already stirred up a quarrel between fighters against corruption in the Cabinet of Ministers.

Bureau of discord

The new bill on the NBAI was drafted jointly with representatives of the Presidential Administration and the Cabinet of Ministers. According to information that Capital possesses, work on revision of the bill was supervised by Minister of Justice Pavlo Petrenko and Deputy Head of the PA Dmytro Shymkiv and Representative of the President in the Cabinet of Ministers Oleksandr Danylyuk. In the core of the new document was the bill drafted by people’s deputy Viktor Chumak (UDAR), who registered in the parliament his version of creating an agency for the fight against corruption in the higher echelons of power back in April. However, since then there was a struggle between different teams and different visions of how to organize the work and authority of the bureau in the VR and the Cabinet. One of the teams was headed by Tetyana Chornovol, who was government’s envoy for the fight against corruption. The current ruling power promised her the post of head of the bureau during the Euro-Maidan. The friction around the version of the bill even became known to the public when Chornovol accused Minister Petrenko of lobbying corruption schemes in the work of the new bureau.

Chumak, however, told Capital that certain changes were recently made to his bill, including those that factor in the criticism of Chornovol. In particular, the sphere of application of the law has been narrowed — the NBAI will engage strictly in the investigation into crimes in which civil servants of the first and second ranks are accused. The previous version of the bill empowered the bureau to investigate the corruption schemes in the private sector. «Chornovol said that the bureau could become an instrument of putting pressure on businesses. In the new document only the state sector remains, where schemes to the tune of more than 600,000 hryvnia will be investigated,» Chumak noted.

The demand according to which the director of the bureau should be older than 35 years and have a degree in law was also stricken from the bill. Chornovol, who just recently turned 35, expressed her opposition to this norm.

In any case, these changes did not reduce the criticism of the government’s envoy on the fight against corruption. Chornovol is confident that the bill will be adopted in the format in which it will pose a threat to business. «It is not true that the work of the bureau will focus solely on to the state sector and will not affect the private sector. Small and medium business will also fall under the scrupulous eye of the bureau,» Chornovol told Capital.

Staff screening

Yet another change is the appointment of the new director of the NBAI. This will be the job of a committee made up of 9 individuals, including three representatives of the president of Ukraine, the Cabinet of Ministers and the Verkhovna Rada each. The committee will also organize and hold an open screening of candidates for the post of the head of the bureau. European experts insisted on a public tender.

«The bill stipulates that individuals that are not civil servants and have moral qualities and social authority should be on this committee,» said Chumak, though he did not specify how the moral traits of members of the committee will be determined.

Executive Director of Transparency International Ukraine Oleksiy Khmara assures that the mission of the bureau is to launch the fight against corruption from a clean sheet. «It is clear that the Prosecutor General’s Office and the State Security Service are incapable of dealing with corruption in Ukraine and often end up involved in some dirty works,» Khmara told Capital.

At the same time, he fears that the anti-corruption bureau may become a hostage of the rivalry between the executive and legislative branches of power as each wants to have influence on the operation of the new body.

People’s deputies that the publication asked predict that the presidential bill has good chances of garnering enough votes of support in the parliament. «In conditions of the election campaign, deputies for whom it is beneficial to show themselves as fighters against corruption will agree to adoption of the bill,» people’s deputy Pavlo Rozenkio (UDAR) told Capital.
As a reminder, the European Union insists on the creation of the anti-corruption bureau in Ukraine seeing it as a part of the visa liberalization program.