A story which has not quite run its course yet

The “battle” over establishing the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NACB) has ended. We will discuss its result in more detail in The Day’s upcoming issues. This time, we offer a brief recounting of how it all unfolded.

Seven MPs of the Verkhovna Rada of the 7th convocation, led by the then chairman of the parliamentary committee on anti-corruption Viktor Chumak, co-sponsored a bill on the National Bureau of Anti-Corruption Investigation on March 26, 2014.

In May 2014, when the bill was to be passed into law, a scandal erupted pitting the expert team against Tetiana Chornovol who was then the Cabinet’s representative for combating corruption. The latter accused the “Chumak group” of purposefully writing a provision into the bill that required the candidate to be over 35 and have a law degree, thus disqualifying Chornovol herself from the position. She responded to the si­tuation with a bill of her own. The team of civic activists were confident that the then head of the Presidential Administration Serhii Pashynsky was trying to take control of the NACB through her.

Actually, it was the first battle over the NACB’s directorship, which the public ma­naged to “win” then.

After the election of the new parliament, it was the time for another battle. The Presidential Administration, paying more attention to the NACB now, had a new bill prepared under its auspices that made the agency’s director dependent on president and prime minister, who obtained a quite simple mechanism for that official’s dismissal. At the same time, the Petro Poroshenko Bloc (PPB) and the Popular Front (PF) had a scandalous confrontation over the bill on the day it was passed. The PPB wanted to ensure that the president alone might dismiss the bureau’s director, provided that a negative assessment by international auditors was in place. Meanwhile, the PF successfully insisted that dismissal should be dependent on parliament as well. While the law was written and rewritten, the parliament’s lobbies and the media were awash with rumors that the president had already decided who would get the new agency’s directorship. Initially, people named Bohdan Vitvitsky, a former American prosecutor of Ukrainian ancestry, as the president’s preferred candidate. However, he turned out to be too old for the position. It was rumored for a long time then that the bureau would be headed by former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili. After his public refusal, people started naming David Sakvarelidze, a Georgian prosecutor now serving as the First Deputy Prosecutor General of Ukraine, as the pre­sident’s most preferred candidate for the position. However, he did not speak Ukrai­nian, so his candidacy was ruled out as well by the competition commission at the se­cond interview stage. As a result, the commission had four candidates selected out of the more than one hundred and a half. All four candidates’ files were submitted to the security services for an examination, and three of them passed it. They were the NACB law’s chief sponsor Viktor Chumak, attorney Mykola Siry, and former prosecutor Artem Sytnyk. However, the commission, allowed by the law to submit up to three candidates to the president, declined to exercise this right. After repeat interviews, it ruled out Chumak’s candidacy. And now, choosing among the two candidates, the president has selected Sytnyk, whose career was seen as possibly most questionable by experts.