Kiev, Ukraine. As Ukraine swirls down the toilet of corruption, efforts to slow the flush are being fought by the very people reform depends upon, who are the ones set to loose the most should anti-corruption in Ukraine take hold.
The government of Volodymyr Groysman seamlessly transitioned from a year-long period of the Parliament’s majority support of its annual program, to one where everybody in the Rada is going in different directions from his reforms in farmland sales and pension reforms, that will harm, not help the elderly.
In one year the Poroshenko government managed to introduce a more corrupt mechanism for evasion of anti-corruption measures, establish a program to exploit the cost of medicines to patients by Poroshenko’s associates as an alternative to corrupt centralized procurement and to promote the introduction of e-declaration of assets of all state officials, despite there still being no courts to deal with corruption in the government of Ukraine, even if it is backed with hard evidence.
Planned reforms in all other spheres, including privatization, deregulation and the introduction of transparency in the pricing of utility services, promised a year ago, are apparently becoming bogged down, and it looks as if Groysman’s team is cooperating under oligarchs’ pressure with more protections for corrupt officials.
The status quo seems to satisfy the current majority of MPs, who are dependent on Poroshenko, Rinat Akhmetov, Dmytro Firtash, Victor Pinchuk and Igor Kolomoisky and it would be impossible to garner the votes to dismiss the corrupt government at the present time.
Yet another member of the presidential team, the head of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) Valeriya Gontareva resigned. In the US and the EU she is hurriedly constructing a strong image as the strong liberated female saviour of troubled banks.
Ukraine, however, has seen a slew of journalistic investigations that reveal major corruption abuses of the NBU from the bank management to operations in the foreign exchange and stock markets. Before her resignation the Anti-Corruption Bureau conducted searches at the NBU in investigation of cases of abuses in lending to banks. If Valeriya did not resign, she would have found herself under arrest in hours, not days.
The current worry in corruption for Kiev is meeting the IMF expectations for reform before the next tranche or Ukraine will be in serious trouble internally as each day brings out more details on a color revolution that was green, turned red and now is 50 shades of dirty gray.