NAZK Discovered Violations in Avakov's Declaration

The National Agency on Corruption Prevention identified violations in the electronic declaration of Interior Minister Arsen Avakov for 2015 year.

This is stated in the NAZK decision, the text of which is available to “Ukrainian News,” as reported by Ukrainska Pravda.

In particular, Avakov sold artist A. Popov's painting “Portrait of a Girl” for 1,5 million hryvnias and indicated this in the section “Income, including gifts,” without mentioning this information in the section “Expenses and transactions.”

Thus, Avakov violated the requirements of part 10 point 1 of article 46 of the Law “On Preventing Corruption,” NAZK notes.

The National Commission on Securities and Stock Market informed NAZK that as of 31 December 2016 of the year Avakov is not among the owners with significant shareholdings in issuers.

At the same time, the State Fiscal Service did not provide information in response to the request.

As a result, NAZK established the accuracy of the declared funds, and no signs of illicit enrichment or conflict of interest were found.

There are no grounds to bring Avakov to criminal or administrative responsibility, the agency notes.

NAZK will give the minister an opportunity to submit an amended declaration.

As is known, previously coordinator of the coalition “Declarations under Control” Oleksandra Drik emphasized that NAZK checks declarations manually.

“It sends paper requests, does not always receive responses to them, and sometimes receives them with such a delay that positive verification results are produced without actual verification of declarations,” Drik noted.

28 August, the National Agency on Corruption Prevention particularly published the result of the verification of the declarations of the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko for 2015 and 2016 years.

The document stated that the Agency was refused access to information by the State Fiscal Service and the Main Department of the SFS in Kyiv regarding information on income paid to the declarant and members of his family for the period from 1998 to 2014 year, as well as by the Department of Preventive Activities of the National Police.