Scandal with data leakage from NABU. The collapse of the anti-corruption agency?

Gizo Uglava, first deputy director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), was fired. The disciplinary commission decided by a majority vote that he had a hand in putting pressure on the detective who exposed his involvement in leaking materials to the defendants, and violated a number of laws and ethical codes in his attempts to somehow influence the course of the case with leaks in “Big Construction” .

Representatives of NABU voted for the guilt of Uglava, and representatives of “Demsokira” from the Council of Public Control of NABU were divided: one of them supported guilt, they were in the minority, and the “indictment” was eventually laid on the table of the director of the bureau, Semyon Krivonos. Krivonos could choose any punishment: from a warning to dismissal. However, leaving Uglava at work, even as a simple caretaker, means leaving a constant shadow of suspicion, so in fact there was no choice: on September 3, the first deputy was fired. But that's not the end of the story

Uglava made a bookmark for this decision and left himself the opportunity to appeal it in court. He filed a complaint with the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption (NACP) about a conflict of interest in the actions of Krivonos. They say he was biased and wanted to fire Uglava regardless of the results of the investigation.

In support of his words, Uglava has a recording of his conversation with Krivonos, which he made on his own voice recorder without any permission. This conversation took place in June, after the release of the Bigus.info story about how the materials of the NABU case against the Big Construction coordinator Yuriy Golik got to the defendant himself. At that time, Uglava and Krivonos looked like accomplices. But then something happened.

According to some reports, a certain insight came to international structures, which until that moment considered Uglava a symbol and pillar of NABU. The insight is understandable. If you are a symbol of NABU, and NABU has turned into a sieve through which everything flows to corrupt officials, who is to blame?

Moreover, just in July-August, detectives carried out two big stories in which there were no already familiar leaks to the president’s office.

The first is suspicion of the head of the Antimonopoly Committee Pavel Kirilenko for illegal enrichment. Of course, the office knew about the fact; no one hid the very fact of its discovery after the release of the journalistic investigation “Schemes”. However, detectives and the prosecutor took an unexpected step for Kirilenko's office patrons. They did not apply for an expert assessment of the defendant’s apartments, cars and land in order to calculate how much it all costs.

Typically, such an appeal gives NABU’s opponents a chance to resist. For example, the Rotterdam+ case has been hanging around in court for several years. But in the AMCU case, the official price of the property, which Kirilenko and his relatives indicated in the sales contracts, was enough for the investigation to see that he had acquired property acquired with non-existent income in an amount much greater than 10 million UAH. And this is exactly the threshold, above which the official faces confiscation and prison. So the OPD skipped this step of the investigation. And Tatarov’s lawyer is already making a mockery of Kirilenko in court because of the version about the purchase of apartments worth tens of millions of hryvnias with the money that his wife’s parents earned by selling raspberries from the garden at the market.

The second is the development of the story with Energy Minister German Galushchenko. First, the SBU involved NABU in the case of Deputy Minister Alexander Kheil, who demanded a bribe from state miners for the opportunity to transport equipment for mines from the Donetsk region to Volyn. This is exactly the story when the SBU announced that the deputy minister was detained thanks to the help of Minister Galushchenko, although the minister learned about the detention after the fact. Moreover, the detectives did not stop with the deputy and went further with searches to the minister himself. And again, no one from the management stopped them.

Contrasts with the picture we have seen at NABU recently. Such figures as the head of the National Bank K. Shevchenko and the State Property Fund S. Sennichenko escaped safely long before the arrest was authorized. The deputy head of the OPU, A. Smirnov, and the State Special Communications Service, Yu. Shchigol, resigned even before the announcement of suspicion. Ex-Minister of Construction A. Chernyshov avoided searches after a meeting with the head of NABU S. Krivonos.

And these are just the star participants of the hit parade. Can you imagine what NABU has become as a result of the long process of alignment?

History of NABU disease

The Bureau was not like that. In 2015, after the Maidan, more than a hundred motivated detectives were elected based on the results of the competition, who very soon began to produce results. It was the detectives of the “first convocation” who reached the current head of the Tax Service R. Nasirov, the nuclear energy pillar of the prime minister’s faction “People’s Front” N. Martynenko, the legal “dealer” of the presidential faction of the BPP A. Granovsky. The traditional anti-corruption bodies of post-Soviet Ukraine - the police, the SBU, the Prosecutor General's Office - have never had access to figures of this level before.

People rejoiced at the success.

Americans clapped their hands at such advertisements for their investment in democracy.

The top corrupt officials were sad and put a spoke in the wheels: detectives had been trying to get the right to autonomous wiretapping for years, but they still had not received an independent examination from the Bank.

And the subcontractors were going through “hard times.” “Aquarium fish” in the office of the head of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office N. Kholodnitsky heard that he was leaking cases to the defendants. The head of the Prosecutor General's Office, Yu. Lutsenko, personally leaked information about undercover NABU agents to the public, and the SBU detained them for “provoking a bribe” to employees of the Ministry of Justice Petrenko from Narfront.

Later, SBU Bakanov, GPU Venediktova and National Police Avakov collapsed a corruption case against the deputy head of the Presidential Office Tatarov, who controlled all law enforcement agencies except NABU.

This external pressure has become one of the elements of tension in NABU. Over time, internal discomfort was added to it.

When the first head of NABU R. Sytnyk resigned, some detectives were simply tired of chronic sabotage from outside and from within.

It was obvious that someone was flushing their investigations down the toilet. In many cases, detectives came for searches, and cleanly cleaned premises or phones cleared of correspondence were already waiting for them. Plus, some millennials (yes, among detectives, too, not everyone is made of steel and crap) were shocked by the harsh management methods of the head of the Main Detective Division.

Thus, the detective environment was fractalized and some were demotivated. Meanwhile, the levers of real power were gathering in the hands of the first deputy head of NABU, Gizo Uglava.

“Tristanovich” (Gizo Uglava’s patronymic, which became a nickname) was assigned to NABU in 2015. His position as first deputy did not provide access to case files. But it was on him that appointments to administrative positions depended (how Uglava hacked NABU from the inside, see the article “Who leads the detectives in the new structure of NABU and what’s wrong with it?”). Therefore, many had informal relations with him. Now, during the disciplinary investigation of Uglava, it has become clear that various bad viruses have penetrated the department of internal investigations and the unit of undercover detectives.

Even before the competition for the head of NABU, I heard a version that Uglava entered into an unspoken pact with Ermak that, without Bankova’s intervention, he would ensure that the winner of the competition would be some weak figure who would be controlled by an experienced player.

A reasonable question: “Why didn’t Uglava go to the competition himself and sell his business as he pleased?” has a simple answer. He really still hasn’t learned the Ukrainian language, and this prevents him from passing any competition for public office. The position of deputy director of NABU is not elective or competitive, and also does not have any terms of office. In fact, Uglava already holds the record among Ukraine’s top officials for the length of time he has been in office—almost ten years.

Despite the fact that detectives had already made an attempt on the life of A. Tatarov and walked around Yu. Golik with the “Big Construction Project” under the roof of the president’s office, it was impossible to blatantly interfere in the competition for the head of NABU, since the bureau remained a sacred cow for the Americans. Therefore, the task was non-trivial.

Subsequently, events unfolded like this. Semyon Krivonos, a member of Saakashvili’s team, applied for the competition. He was on the team of the head of the Odessa Regional State Administration (does anyone else remember that Saakashvili was there?) and was responsible for some customs issues. Then he headed the Office of Simple Solutions and from there moved to the State Inspectorate of Architecture and Urban Planning. Krivonos did not develop a significant trail of corruption here, because it was very difficult to show him selectivity in carrying out, or, that is, not carrying out, inspections of some construction sites by his inspectors.

The competition commission for electing the director of NABU consisted half of international experts and Ukrainians. Although it was formally headed by Ukrainian Nikolai Kucheryavenko, the informal leader was foreign expert Drago Kos, who worked at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). He voted for Krivonos, although not all international experts voted for this candidate. For example, former FBI agent Karen Greenway was against it.

However, Kos was for Krivonos, and he was eventually appointed director of NABU. And Saakashvili stated that “all attempts to bring down his candidacy were eliminated thanks to Andrei Ermak and Alexei Chernyshev” (the aforementioned minister who escaped searches). Journalists also discovered that Krivonos’s wife worked together with Ermak’s deputy Alexei Kuleba, the current curator of regional (and sometimes construction) policy at the OPU.

Then it was a matter of technique for the experienced Uglava to take the customs and construction newcomer under his wing. And communicator Polina Lysenko, a good friend of Uglava, who communicated with the OECD and other international organizations, was scandalously appointed deputy director of NABU.

For many detectives, this became a trigger.

Some soon quit, realizing the lack of prospects in this Bureau design.

Andrei Kaluzhinsky and several other well-known detectives were actually forced to resign due to an investigation by the NABU Internal Control Department. It is headed by Roman Osipchuk, who was one of Krivonos’ two “competitors” in the final three of the competition for director of NABU.

And after that, a scandal erupted: one of the NABU detectives filed a statement with the SAP about signs that investigation materials about “Big Construction” were being leaked at the highest level. It turned out that the adviser to the presidential office, Georgy Birkadze, sent information about the NABU investigation into his person to the Big Construction coordinator Yuriy Golik.

Purely mathematically, Gizo Uglava fit the definition of someone who could leak data to Birkadze, and not only to him, perfectly. The insider had to work in a top position at NABU for a long time, because leaks occurred under both the old and the new directors of the bureau.

After the detective’s statement, cameras, spotlights and people’s attention invaded the sleepy kingdom of NABU. Investigations by parliamentarians and critical publications in the media began. In parallel, SAP began its research on other cases in the bureau. The head began to make mistakes.

At first, he allegedly hinted to the OPU that he would blackmail them by leaking some data if they did not “sign up” for him. And then he really started blackmailing, recording his conversation with Krivonos on a tape recorder. Uglava said that he was innocent and he just needed to get out of this story with a clean reputation so that he could find a job with decent employers. And Krivonos explained to him that with the scale of the data published in the media, this is no longer realistic.

At that time, an investigation by ZN.UA and Bigus.info was published about leaking information about the NABU case to Golik, as well as a story by Mikhail Tkach in Ukrayinska Pravda about Krivonos’s involvement in sabotaging the NABU case about the possible involvement of Alexey Chernyshev in a land construction deal .

A printout of this conversation between Uglava and Krivonos spread among Ukraine’s foreign partners a few days ago. Uglava also gave her audio recording to the members of the Disciplinary Commission, which was considering the issue of his involvement in leaking information to the defendants.

In the end, he handed it over to the NAPC to open a case against Krivonos. And NAPC was recently headed by another former NABU detective, Pavluschik, who also worked with Uglava. He was enthusiastic about his former boss's announcement and opened production. If a certain decision is made based on the result, it will allow Uglava to appeal Krivonos’ decision to dismiss him in court. And if the court also receives instructions from Bankova to satisfy the complainant, then Uglava will return to his post.

Then we will all have to wonder what we witnessed. Either Krivonos really tried to stay on the bright side of history, or he was simply a pawn from the dark side.

The worst thing is that this will remain a puzzle for the Americans. For many years they considered Uglava to be the person who ensures the proper functioning of NABU. However, recently they have received a lot of information about the downside of being a deputy director. Now Americans understand that the issue of Uglava is not a question of the viability of the symbol of reform in Ukraine. This is just the ongoing repair of one post and several other departments in the average NABU, where mold has bloomed in the corners. That is, we are not talking about an attack on the institution, but only about targeted changes to level out the situation.