The Case of Judge Bosyi: NACP and HQCJ Have Nowhere to Back Down

The Case of Judge Bosyi: NACP and HQCJ Have Nowhere to Back Down

The head of the Commercial Court of Kyiv, Vadym Bosyi, is again in the spotlight of anti-corruption activists. The new law restoring electronic asset declarations leaves the National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP) no choice but to carry out a full review of the judge’s lifestyle and the allegations of illicit enrichment. And the High Qualification Commission of Judges (HQCJ) will be forced to consider eight separate submissions to review judges’ integrity declarations for the years 2015 – 2022.

Moreover, the judge has publicly lost the support of at least one of the deputy heads of the Office of the President responsible for the security bloc, which effectively makes it inevitable that he will be held accountable disciplinarily, and possibly criminally. Read more about this in the article.

The figure featured on the “Judge Vovk tapes,” Vadym Bosyi, according to publicly available information on the court’s own website, is currently on vacation. However, civic activists who track corruption risks and monitor judges’ lifestyles are not taking a break. In one of the most resonant cases of recent times — the so-called “Judge Bosyi case” — significant developments have emerged, and therefore the drama is likely to reach a climax and resolution soon.

Recall that Judge Vadym Bosyi came under activists’ scrutiny because of an unusual method of hiding his assets: despite a declared divorce from his wife, he continued to live with her as one household, a joint child was born “out of wedlock,” and he freely used property registered to the “ex-wife” and her relatives. These are obvious signs of false declaration (children and wife were not listed in the declaration) and illicit enrichment and concealment of assets. In the context of international partners’ allegations about lack of anti-corruption efforts, particularly within the judiciary, and the special attention President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pays to this issue, investigating these facts and holding the judge accountable should be demonstrative.

At the beginning of October activists appealed to two supervisory bodies that should have reacted to the judge’s violations. The first was the National Agency on Corruption Prevention, which should check the official’s asset declarations. The second was the High Qualification Commission of Judges, which is competent to review the integrity declaration judges submit annually, where they affirm the accuracy of asset information, absence of conflicts of interest, and other items that confirm judicial integrity. Violations found in either body could have serious consequences for Judge Bosyi — up to removal from judicial office, and possibly a prison term of up to ten years for illicit enrichment.

However, the mentioned bodies were slow to take up Bosyi’s case. NACP cited martial law, during which it allegedly could not conduct declaration checks. Activists considered this a manipulative reading of the law, since restrictions applied only to declarations submitted after martial law was introduced. Even so, this did not prevent NACP from monitoring the lifestyles of officials at various levels and reporting publicly on that work. Since 12 October 2023, when Law No. 3384-IX restoring electronic declaration and thus declaration checks came into force, NACP effectively has no grounds left to refuse monitoring Bosyi’s lifestyle and reviewing his asset declarations. Now such a review is a direct obligation of the agency under the law, and heightened public attention to the “Bosyi case” is an additional incentive to provide official answers about whether the judge’s purported divorce was a legal method to hide his assets.

The HQCJ did not refuse to consider the complaint about inaccuracies in Judge Bosyi’s integrity declaration. The activists’ complaint was reviewed, but citing a formal legal requirement, the commission did not make a decision: it argued that one complaint should be submitted for each declaration for each year activists find suspicious. The activists have now prepared 8 separate complaints — one for each year from 2015 to 2022, when they believe Bosyi submitted inaccurate information about his assets and income in his integrity declarations. Each complaint lists all facts of ownership and use of cars and apartments that Bosyi registered to his “former” wife, while in some cases he even documented joint residence himself with notarized permission for purchasing housing.

Beyond the legislative innovations and the new set of documents activists will submit to the HQCJ, another factor has emerged in Bosyi’s case. It could significantly simplify holding the head of Kyiv’s Commercial Court accountable for illicit enrichment and false declarations. As repeatedly reported by the media, one factor of Bosyi’s alleged “immunity” from investigation was his purported familiarity with deputy heads of the Office of the President Andrii Smirnov and Oleh Tatarov, who are responsible for judicial reform and law enforcement issues. Bosyi allegedly “boasted” about this familiarity at every opportunity. Until now these claims were supported only by bloggers’ statements. But in a recent interview with NV, Andrii Smirnov himself unexpectedly confirmed this unjustified overconfidence of Bosyi’s.

“There is a situation in Kyiv courts when a newly elected leader, a person-cosmonaut, walks around every day and tells his judges that tomorrow he will resolve all their issues in the HQCJ. Three minutes later he says he was with someone on Bankova Street. They should understand that the cause-and-effect link of their problems is themselves. And such people exist too,” — a direct quote from Smirnov’s interview. Recall that Bosyi was elected head of the Commercial Court of Kyiv on 29 May 2023. The label “cosmonaut” likely refers to a person who does not align their real abilities with their desired ambitions.

The tone in which Smirnov speaks about this practice clearly does not favor Bosyi. Therefore, this public “disavowal” by a deputy head of the Office of the President turns all formal and informal “indulgences” of the head of the Commercial Court of Kyiv to dust. It also completely removes any conceptual restrictions for NACP and HQCJ regarding investigating the judge’s abuses (although they should have done so regardless).

Adding a bit of conspiracy-thinking, one might suppose that Smirnov’s mention of this episode in the interview could also signal to people like Bosyi about the consequences of such statements and “bragging” about nonexistent powers and contacts, and suggest additional scrutiny the subject should expect. A similar development can be seen in Smirnov’s earlier public “exchange” with now-former Supreme Court head Vsevolod Knyaziev, who in February criticized the Office of the President for “simulating” judicial reform and a few months later traded his Supreme Court chair for pretrial detention after being caught in the act taking a bribe.

From this perspective, the Bosyi case should become not only an example of an objective and fair investigation into the facts of illicit enrichment, false declarations, and asset concealment, but also a deterrent against the overconfidence of officials who practice “kicking doors open” based on mythical “connections” and “agreements” with people and institutions that have never heard of those “connections” and “agreements.”