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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
The selection commission that chose leaders for the State Bureau of Investigations did not ask the most notorious candidates questions about the media scandals connected to them and doubts about their integrity during interviews. This is reported in a piece by Danylo Mokryk for the program “Nashi Hroshi with Denys Bihus.”
BIHUS.Info journalists spoke with five candidates about whom negative information had been circulated by the media and which the Commission members should have been aware of. We asked our questions immediately after their competition interviews concluded.
The most questions were directed at Yevhen Ablov, who currently serves as deputy head of the Kyiv District Administrative Court and sought to head the SBI territorial office in Mykolaiv.
Yevhen Ablov is known, among other things, for ordering the clearing of barricades from central Kyiv in December 2013 during the Revolution of Dignity. Already in 2017 Ablov heard the case “Avakov’s Son’s Backpacks” — and decided that the controversial tender took place without violations of the law.
The commission members did not ask him questions about these two matters during the interview.
“Tell me, please, what about the Maidan cases? Did you see that decision?” Ablov replied to BIHUS.Info journalists about his decision in 2013.
He was equally laconic about the “Avakov’s Son’s Backpacks” case: “And what do backpacks have to do with Avakov’s son, and what does this case have to do with me? I know nothing about this case.”
SBU officer Serhiy Karpushyn — a former advisor to the head of the National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP) — also applied for a position at the SBI. Last year, the former head of the NACP Financial Control Department, Hanna Solomatina, accused Karpushyn of blocking corruption investigations at the Agency. Allegedly, when employees turned documents about corruption over to the Prosecutor General’s Office, Serhiy Karpushyn personally stopped the progress of those documents.
Members of the Selection Commission also did not ask him about these accusations — nor did they ask about the collection of luxury watches, jewelry, and large sums of cash listed in his (or his family’s) declaration.
“I think that the accusations Solomatina made to the whole country are not quite appropriate… How could I have taken materials from the Prosecutor General’s Office? I’m not an official of the Prosecutor General’s Office!” he responded to journalists’ questions.
Karpushyn’s answer about his wife’s declaration was short: “Every year her declaration was checked by the fiscal authorities. And there were no questions about it.”
Obolonskyi District prosecutor in Kyiv Dmytro Spravedlyvyi was once featured on the program “Nashi Hroshi with Denys Bihus” for his apartment in the Klovskyi residential complex with a market value of about 15 million UAH. Meanwhile, his declaration lists the price of that apartment as only 4,5 million UAH.
The SBI Selection Commission also did not ask him about this property during the interview. However, BIHUS.Info journalists were oddly assured by Prosecutor Spravedlyvyi that he was asked such a question at the interview.
“Of course, they asked… The price of the apartment (as stated in the declaration — ed.) corresponds to reality. This is fully documented… I am deeply convinced that I have nothing to hide,” he said.
BIHUS.Info journalists recently published an article about Ruslan Biriukov. He now chairs another Selection Commission at the SBI that chooses middle-level employees. The article said that in 2016 Biriukov failed to reach the passing score on general skills tests during police re-certification.
As a candidate for the position of department head at the SBI, Ruslan Biriukov scored 100 points out of 100 on legislation tests. Yet the Commission did not ask him about the poor re-certification test results in the police, nor about his absolute score on the SBI tests.
“And why should they have asked me? I’m fine. I studied,” he explained to journalists.
The only candidate the Commission did ask about integrity was Dmytro Rudenko. This head of the Khmilnyk District police in Vinnytsia region sought to lead the SBI territorial office in Khmelnytskyi. He had been accused of participating in the falsification of a criminal case against human rights defender Dmytro Hroysman in 2010–2011. In particular, the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union made such claims.
However, Dmytro Rudenko refused to speak with journalists after the interview. He scheduled a meeting for an interview the next day but simply did not show up.
On the eve of this segment’s release, a purportedly approved list of contest winners appeared in the media. It included, among others, the names of Dmytro Rudenko and Yevhen Ablov.
However, when the Selection Commission officially announced the winners a few hours before the segment aired, neither of those names appeared.
The candidates selected by the Commission must undergo a special vetting procedure, after which SBI head Roman Truba may appoint them to positions. If they fail that vetting, their places may be taken by other candidates.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Комісія ДБР не ставила одіозним кандидатам запитань про скандали і доброчесність". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: Bihus.Info.
