Financial mechanisms of political influence in the Ukrainian parliament, before and after the Maidan
The financial political practices of the Yanukovych era…
In 2016 a series of articles appeared in the Ukrainian press offering a glimpse into the operation of a wide-ranging and expensive system of political payments run by the Party of Regions (PoR), the political organisation of Viktor Yanukovych, in the years leading up to and during his presidency in 2010-14.
Originating in the “black ledger” (off-book accounts) of Yanukovych and his circle, the documents on which these articles were based had been handed to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) by Viktor Trepak, a former deputy head of the Ukrainian Security Service, allegedly in response to the blocking of his investigation into the financial crimes of the Yanukovych era (Kuznetsov, 2017; Sukhov, 2016).
Supporting these accounts, in an interview from 2017, Taras Chornovil, who ran the presidential election campaign of Yanukovych in 2004, recounts that PoR practice of “paying for deputies from other parliamentary factions to vote in legislative projects the party needed” began to be formalised and centralised from 2006, on the initiative of Borys Koleshnikov, a deputy for the Opposition Bloc after the 2014 general election who is close to Rinat Akhmetov, consistently ranked as richest of Ukraine’s oligarch. This accounting function, he says, was taken over more narrowly by Yanukovych and his group following his victory in the 2010 presidential election (Kuznetsov, 2017).
According to the ledger, for the whole of the four years of the Yanukovych presidency, the PoR’s illicit payments came to US$2bn, equal to US$500m per year (Tucker, 2016). This is a remarkably high figure for a country with an average annual nominal GDP in this period of around US$165bn, on World Bank data.
Accounts concur on the key role of PoR political fixers in delivering large cash sums to journalists, judges, and electoral and local authority officials, in return for favourable coverage or decisions, as well as to a well-connected image consultant, Paul Manafort.
More to the point for the current investigation, the documents record the details of payments to a number of political parties—both allies and opponents of the PoR—as well as to individual people’s deputies (MPs) in the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament. The “chief curators” in the process are identified by Sevgil Musayeva, the editor of Ukrayinska Pravda, an online news outlet with national coverage, as Yevhen Genner, one-time head of the parliamentary budget committee, and Vitaliy Kalyuzhny, a PoR MP (Ukrainian Crisis Media Centre, 2016).
As examples of the kinds of transactions involved, the ledgers record a PoR intermediary, one V.N. Slaba, receiving US$250,000 in December 2009 to pay to Yuriy Kostenko of Our Ukraine, the party of the then president, Viktor Yushchenko. A second entry records the allocation in April 2010 of US$500,000 to Vitaly Kalyuzhny, a PoR MP, for payment to Inna Bohoslovska (Sukhov, 2016). This last was in payment, it is suggested, for her resigning from the PoR to stand as a candidate in the 2010 presidential election, with the aim of drawing votes away from Yulia Tymoshenko, Yanukovych’s main rival in the contest.
… carried over into the post-Maidan period
One of the key demands to emerge from the Maidan protests of 2013/14 was for a break with just these kinds of corrupt procedures in public life, which, though present before, seemed to proliferate during the Yanukovych presidency.
However, the revelation in 2018 of the WhatsApp texts of Oleksandr Onyshchenko, a Rada deputy at the time of the communications in 2015, as a results of an investigation by Hromadske’s Slidstvo.info TV show, demonstrate the continuation of financial means of political influence at the highest level into the post-Maidan era. They show Onyshchenko discussing the practicalities of buying votes in the Rada with key deputies linked to Petro Poroshenko, who succeeded Yanukovych as Ukraine’s elected head of state in the presidential contest of May 2014.
These text dialogues implicate key Poroshenko lieutenants and put Tymoshenko in a poor light. They also point to a continuity in informal political habits between the pre- and post-Maidan parliaments, the anti-corruption rhetoric of the post-Maidan authorities not withstanding. This picture of continuity in the informal mechanisms of political influence between Rada convocations will provide some context for interpretation of the results of the analysis of voting patterns on “prosperity” laws in the Rada later in the chapter.
In 2016 a series of articles appeared in the Ukrainian press offering a glimpse into the operation of a wide-ranging and expensive system of political payments run by the Party of Regions (PoR), the political organisation of Viktor Yanukovych, in the years leading up to and during his presidency in 2010-14.
Originating in the “black ledger” (off-book accounts) of Yanukovych and his circle, the documents on which these articles were based had been handed to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) by Viktor Trepak, a former deputy head of the Ukrainian Security Service, allegedly in response to the blocking of his investigation into the financial crimes of the Yanukovych era (Kuznetsov, 2017; Sukhov, 2016).
Supporting these accounts, in an interview from 2017, Taras Chornovil, who ran the presidential election campaign of Yanukovych in 2004, recounts that PoR practice of “paying for deputies from other parliamentary factions to vote in legislative projects the party needed” began to be formalised and centralised from 2006, on the initiative of Borys Koleshnikov, a deputy for the Opposition Bloc after the 2014 general election who is close to Rinat Akhmetov, consistently ranked as richest of Ukraine’s oligarch. This accounting function, he says, was taken over more narrowly by Yanukovych and his group following his victory in the 2010 presidential election (Kuznetsov, 2017).
According to the ledger, for the whole of the four years of the Yanukovych presidency, the PoR’s illicit payments came to US$2bn, equal to US$500m per year (Tucker, 2016). This is a remarkably high figure for a country with an average annual nominal GDP in this period of around US$165bn, on World Bank data.
Accounts concur on the key role of PoR political fixers in delivering large cash sums to journalists, judges, and electoral and local authority officials, in return for favourable coverage or decisions, as well as to a well-connected image consultant, Paul Manafort.
More to the point for the current investigation, the documents record the details of payments to a number of political parties—both allies and opponents of the PoR—as well as to individual people’s deputies (MPs) in the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament. The “chief curators” in the process are identified by Sevgil Musayeva, the editor of Ukrayinska Pravda, an online news outlet with national coverage, as Yevhen Genner, one-time head of the parliamentary budget committee, and Vitaliy Kalyuzhny, a PoR MP (Ukrainian Crisis Media Centre, 2016).
As examples of the kinds of transactions involved, the ledgers record a PoR intermediary, one V.N. Slaba, receiving US$250,000 in December 2009 to pay to Yuriy Kostenko of Our Ukraine, the party of the then president, Viktor Yushchenko. A second entry records the allocation in April 2010 of US$500,000 to Vitaly Kalyuzhny, a PoR MP, for payment to Inna Bohoslovska (Sukhov, 2016). This last was in payment, it is suggested, for her resigning from the PoR to stand as a candidate in the 2010 presidential election, with the aim of drawing votes away from Yulia Tymoshenko, Yanukovych’s main rival in the contest.
… carried over into the post-Maidan period
One of the key demands to emerge from the Maidan protests of 2013/14 was for a break with just these kinds of corrupt procedures in public life, which, though present before, seemed to proliferate during the Yanukovych presidency.
However, the revelation in 2018 of the WhatsApp texts of Oleksandr Onyshchenko, a Rada deputy at the time of the communications in 2015, as a results of an investigation by Hromadske’s Slidstvo.info TV show, demonstrate the continuation of financial means of political influence at the highest level into the post-Maidan era. They show Onyshchenko discussing the practicalities of buying votes in the Rada with key deputies linked to Petro Poroshenko, who succeeded Yanukovych as Ukraine’s elected head of state in the presidential contest of May 2014.
Onyshchenko’s mobile phone texts, in Russian, are peppered with short-hand code words. One exchange from May 2015 is with Serhiy Berezenko, a faction leader in Poroshenko’s eponymous party, the Petro Poroshenko Bloc (PPB). It relates to attempts to secure the appointment of Oleksiy Malovatsky, who had worked as a lawyer for Poroshenko, to the High Council of Justice. In the text, Onyshchenko seems to be arranging a deal to buy the voting support of Fatherland deputies on the issue, in exchange for a cash payment. He writes that he has spoken with “Y.V.” (Yulia Vladimirovna Tymoshenko, the leader of the Fatherland party, then still part of the governing coalition), and reports that she awaits the “documents” (said to be code for an illicit monetary fee) the following day. In a second exchange on an unspecified vote, Ihor Kononenko, a close business associate of Poroshenko’s since their army days appears to signal his readiness to pay “the girl” (again, Tymoshenko) US$1m to (Sukhov, 2018).
These text dialogues implicate key Poroshenko lieutenants and put Tymoshenko in a poor light. They also point to a continuity in informal political habits between the pre- and post-Maidan parliaments, the anti-corruption rhetoric of the post-Maidan authorities not withstanding. This picture of continuity in the informal mechanisms of political influence between Rada convocations will provide some context for interpretation of the results of the analysis of voting patterns on “prosperity” laws in the Rada later in the chapter.
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