Leonid Bershidsky
By Leonid Bershidsky
Throughout its 23 years as an independent state, Ukraine has been one of the most corrupt countries in the world. As it tries to clean itself up, the people driving change are predictably frustrated by the formidable resistance they face, and yet remarkably undeterred.
Tatyana Kozachenko, 39, was the founding partner in a Kiev corporate law firm when Ukraine’s “revolution of dignity” began in 2013. Suddenly, all she was doing was pro bono work for protesters, serving as a self-described “legal ambulance”. She had become so frustrated with the stifling, corrupt system built under President Viktor Yanukovich that she felt her day job no longer made sense.
“It was all decided before one could do anything about it — the kickbacks, the schemes, the raids on businesses that someone in the Yanukovich family liked,” Kozachenko says. “I had a client who was told to give up a factory for 30 percent of its value, and when he was slow to do it, suddenly there were six criminal cases against him.”
While defending activists in the Yanukovich-controlled courts, Kozachenko and a group of like-minded people became convinced that what Ukraine needed was lustration — a ban on civil service employment for people who held the top jobs under the Yanukovich regime. After the president fled to Russia early last year, Kozachenko helped the newly-appointed Justice Minister, Pavlo Petrenko, draft a lustration bill. She was soon brought into the ministry to oversee the process, without a budget and with a staff of 15 poorly paid civil servants. “It was do it or be sorry later,” she says.
Kozachenko has occupied a cramped office in the Justice Ministry for four months and is happy with what she’s achieved so far. She’s been developing Excel spreadsheets that track the job moves of Yanukovich-era officials, to see if government agencies have fired them as required by the law. Most quit voluntarily when the law came into effect last summer, but some managed to hold on to their positions because the heads of government bodies closed their eyes — or actually wanted people with their experience.
“These are useful people if you want to get in on the schemes they were running,” Kozachenko says.
Monday, she took one of her spreadsheets to David Sakvarelidze, who was put in charge of reforming the Prosecutor General’s office a month ago. A Georgian national, Sakvarelidze has trouble typing on the computer in his office, having never used a Cyrillic keyboard before. Yet he is working hard to slash the number of prosecutors and investigators from the current 18,000, so he can double the salaries of the staff that remain. He was acutely interested in Kozachenko’s data, which shows him where to find Yanukovich holdouts he can fire.
Kozachenko and Sakvarelidze are open about their frustration at the slow pace of change.
“When reforms began in Georgia in 2003, the entire government budget was $700m,” recalls Sakvarelidze, who helped implement former President Mikheil Saakashvili’s law enforcement reforms in the Caucasus nation. “The very first year, we retrieved $1.4bn stolen by officials under the previous regime. Ukraine needs these resources, but it’s not getting them back.”
Georgia got the money by summarily cutting plea bargain deals with the former officials. Ukrainian law doesn’t allow this, but then strictly speaking nor did Georgia’s. Sakvarelidze figures Ukraine could get $5bn just by bringing back 10 to 15 percent of the funds that used to be stolen from Ukraine in one year. “The Yanukovich people who fled to Russia don’t like it there,” Sakvarelidze says. “They want to be able to return, travel to Europe. But what are we offering them except the certainty of jail terms? What do we really want: a former bureaucrat in prison for 10 years or 80 percent of what he stole back in government coffers?”
Few former officials have been convicted of corruption — related crimes. There have been suicides by former Yanukovich allies who remained in Ukraine, but no arrests of major old-regime figures. European sanctions against Yanukovich’s allies have recently begun lapsing, because Ukraine does little to investigate them.
“I’d like to see faster changes,” Sakvarelidze says. “The political spectrum here is much more fragmented than it used to be in Georgia, and the oligarch groups wield a lot of influence through legislators.”
In this environment of indecision and fragmentation, corruption has endured. “OK, the standard kickback has dropped to 15 percent from 30 percent, but that’s largely because people have no money to pay it,” Kozachenko says. The heads of the tax and customs services as well as the government financial inspectorate, an anti-corruption watchdog, have been suspended on corruption charges, and the head of the state agency for emergencies was recently handcuffed and led away from a cabinet meeting.
No matter what’s behind the arrests and suspensions, both Kozachenko and Sakvarelidze like the publicity they generate.
“We need to get rid of the cult of the civil servant as someone untouchable,” Sakvarelidze says.
WP-BLOOMBERG
By Leonid Bershidsky
Throughout its 23 years as an independent state, Ukraine has been one of the most corrupt countries in the world. As it tries to clean itself up, the people driving change are predictably frustrated by the formidable resistance they face, and yet remarkably undeterred.
Tatyana Kozachenko, 39, was the founding partner in a Kiev corporate law firm when Ukraine’s “revolution of dignity” began in 2013. Suddenly, all she was doing was pro bono work for protesters, serving as a self-described “legal ambulance”. She had become so frustrated with the stifling, corrupt system built under President Viktor Yanukovich that she felt her day job no longer made sense.
“It was all decided before one could do anything about it — the kickbacks, the schemes, the raids on businesses that someone in the Yanukovich family liked,” Kozachenko says. “I had a client who was told to give up a factory for 30 percent of its value, and when he was slow to do it, suddenly there were six criminal cases against him.”
While defending activists in the Yanukovich-controlled courts, Kozachenko and a group of like-minded people became convinced that what Ukraine needed was lustration — a ban on civil service employment for people who held the top jobs under the Yanukovich regime. After the president fled to Russia early last year, Kozachenko helped the newly-appointed Justice Minister, Pavlo Petrenko, draft a lustration bill. She was soon brought into the ministry to oversee the process, without a budget and with a staff of 15 poorly paid civil servants. “It was do it or be sorry later,” she says.
Kozachenko has occupied a cramped office in the Justice Ministry for four months and is happy with what she’s achieved so far. She’s been developing Excel spreadsheets that track the job moves of Yanukovich-era officials, to see if government agencies have fired them as required by the law. Most quit voluntarily when the law came into effect last summer, but some managed to hold on to their positions because the heads of government bodies closed their eyes — or actually wanted people with their experience.
“These are useful people if you want to get in on the schemes they were running,” Kozachenko says.
Monday, she took one of her spreadsheets to David Sakvarelidze, who was put in charge of reforming the Prosecutor General’s office a month ago. A Georgian national, Sakvarelidze has trouble typing on the computer in his office, having never used a Cyrillic keyboard before. Yet he is working hard to slash the number of prosecutors and investigators from the current 18,000, so he can double the salaries of the staff that remain. He was acutely interested in Kozachenko’s data, which shows him where to find Yanukovich holdouts he can fire.
Kozachenko and Sakvarelidze are open about their frustration at the slow pace of change.
“When reforms began in Georgia in 2003, the entire government budget was $700m,” recalls Sakvarelidze, who helped implement former President Mikheil Saakashvili’s law enforcement reforms in the Caucasus nation. “The very first year, we retrieved $1.4bn stolen by officials under the previous regime. Ukraine needs these resources, but it’s not getting them back.”
Georgia got the money by summarily cutting plea bargain deals with the former officials. Ukrainian law doesn’t allow this, but then strictly speaking nor did Georgia’s. Sakvarelidze figures Ukraine could get $5bn just by bringing back 10 to 15 percent of the funds that used to be stolen from Ukraine in one year. “The Yanukovich people who fled to Russia don’t like it there,” Sakvarelidze says. “They want to be able to return, travel to Europe. But what are we offering them except the certainty of jail terms? What do we really want: a former bureaucrat in prison for 10 years or 80 percent of what he stole back in government coffers?”
Few former officials have been convicted of corruption — related crimes. There have been suicides by former Yanukovich allies who remained in Ukraine, but no arrests of major old-regime figures. European sanctions against Yanukovich’s allies have recently begun lapsing, because Ukraine does little to investigate them.
“I’d like to see faster changes,” Sakvarelidze says. “The political spectrum here is much more fragmented than it used to be in Georgia, and the oligarch groups wield a lot of influence through legislators.”
In this environment of indecision and fragmentation, corruption has endured. “OK, the standard kickback has dropped to 15 percent from 30 percent, but that’s largely because people have no money to pay it,” Kozachenko says. The heads of the tax and customs services as well as the government financial inspectorate, an anti-corruption watchdog, have been suspended on corruption charges, and the head of the state agency for emergencies was recently handcuffed and led away from a cabinet meeting.
No matter what’s behind the arrests and suspensions, both Kozachenko and Sakvarelidze like the publicity they generate.
“We need to get rid of the cult of the civil servant as someone untouchable,” Sakvarelidze says.
WP-BLOOMBERG
