Donations as Indulgences and Shadow Bail: Results of 7 Years of the High Anti-Corruption Court’s Work

The High Anti-Corruption Court marks its first seven years with cautious optimism that feels more like trying to drain an ocean with a teaspoon.

For the first time in its history the pile of unresolved cases did not grow but shrank by a record five cases, while judges try to clear schemes single-handedly faster than MPs manage to bury corruption charges under statutes of limitations. However, the celebratory mood is spoiled by a striking reality: top officials are massively buying indulgences through charitable donations under plea deals, bails for former ministers are being laundered through hundreds of shell companies right under the court’s nose, and Parliament, in its eighth year of this convocation, traditionally forgets to vote on reforms that might inconveniently affect the deputies themselves, notes ZN.ua.

September marks seven years since the High Anti-Corruption Court began work. And for the first time in that period the number of unresolved cases at HACC did not increase but slightly decreased. The scale of change is still small, but the long-term trend has for the first time reversed direction.

The court is gradually improving its work: single-judge hearings have produced results, staffing has been strengthened, and plea agreements with defendants are being used more actively. But it is too early to speak of a stable trend.

HACC’s progress can be nullified by problematic statutes of limitation, procedural abuses, opacity of certain agreements, and the origin of funds posted as bail. Some of these problems the court cannot solve on its own — parliamentary decisions are needed, and these have been deferred for years. So it is important to understand not only what helped HACC pick up pace, but also what prevents turning initial positive results into a lasting trend.

Where this positive change in the numbers came from

What is most telling, in my view, is not the raw numbers themselves but what lies behind them. From the outset HACC received hundreds of cases, and for years the backlog of unresolved matters steadily grew — from 149 in 2019 to 327 in 2025. This not only indicated increased workload for the court but also gave opponents of HACC grounds to question whether it should exist at all.

But the accumulation of practical experience and work on mistakes changed the trend. Already in 2025 HACC handled a record 114 criminal cases, and in the first half of 2026 the number of cases concluded (72) for the first time exceeded the number of new cases filed with the court (71). Thus the years-long accumulation of unresolved proceedings finally stopped and even shrank slightly — from 327 to 322 cases.

As for convictions, in just the first half of 2026 HACC issued 65 verdicts: 82 persons convicted and 8 acquitted. If we recall that in 2025 the Anti-Corruption Court issued a total of 109 verdicts, current statistics again show a clear upward trend in the court’s productivity. Meanwhile, the court applied special confiscation to 10 persons — resulting in nearly 71,8 million UAH seized.

Over seven years HACC has handed down 431 verdicts concerning 601 persons: 398 guilty and 33 acquittals; 211 guilty verdicts were based on plea agreements. Among those convicted are judges, prosecutors, state enterprise heads, cabinet members, former and current MPs. Actual prison terms were received, among others, by current MP Anatoliy Gunko, former Prosecutor General’s Office official Dmytro Sus, ex-MP Ruslan Solvar, and former director of the Institute of Agroecology of the NAAS Orest Furdichko.

A separate result of HACC’s work is civil confiscation of unjustified assets: in 48 officials had property worth nearly 230 million UAH seized.

The data presented only partially characterize HACC’s results. Looking at the broader picture it is important to know how many guilty verdicts have become final, how many convicted persons have actually been deprived of liberty and how many of them are top officials. Likewise, one should distinguish between imposed and actually executed fines, confiscations, and reimbursements to the state. The relevant measure of the Rule of Law Roadmap was supposed to be implemented by the end of 2026.

Voluntary payments under plea deals, including contributions for the needs of the Armed Forces, have social utility but are not punishment and are also difficult to treat as restitution of state losses. Although they show how criminal justice tools are being used to try to replenish the budget.

So where did this positive change come from? We can offer several explanations.

First, it is worth recalling that single-judge proceedings, legislatively introduced back in 2024, have proven effective in practice: the share of cases heard by a single judge increased from 22% to 29% of HACC’s caseload.

The difference in duration is telling: single-judge cases are completed on average in 11 months, whereas collegiate hearings take on average nearly 3 years 9 months. In some instances single-judge review was even faster: the case of the acting director of one state institute of the NAAS, Viktoriya Poltavchenko, was decided in just 5 months. Even longer proceedings in this format remain relatively moderate — for example, the case against deputy of the Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi district council of Odesa region Anatoliy Khmilkivskyi lasted exactly 1 years.

An additional factor that is likely to further strengthen this dynamic is the long-awaited influx of personnel. Two judges appointed after the second competition to HACC already preside over a number of high-profile cases, noticeably easing the court’s load. And since the President of Ukraine has now appointed another 17 winners of the competition for HACC and the Chamber of Appeals judges, the scale of staffing reinforcement will grow even more. At the same time, the appointment of another 5 judges remains pending.

It is also worth looking separately at the structure of verdicts over the last 12 months — from 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2026. During this period the number of plea-based verdicts rose to 72 versus 58 in the previous 12 months, although their share among all guilty verdicts slightly declined — from 66% to 62%.

At the same time, cases have appeared where a defendant who entered into a plea agreement still serves actual, albeit shorter, imprisonment. For example, after one of last year’s most high-profile agreements, the verdict still sentenced former head of the Supreme Court Vsevolod Knyazev to 4 years’ imprisonment. The approach to transparency is also changing: for instance, in the case of the head of the Agency for Local Roads of Poltava region Oleksiy Basan the court closed only part of the information from public access rather than the entire text of the verdict, as was commonly done. This is so far an exception, not standard practice, but the fact that this approach is being applied is significant.

At the same time, the rise in plea agreements alone does not yet demonstrate their effectiveness. In top-corruption cases their value lies not only in faster convictions but also in incriminating testimony against other participants and organizers of schemes. Such information cannot always be disclosed immediately so as not to harm further investigation. However, it should later be assessed whether those testimonies led to new convictions. Currently SAP’s policy on plea agreements and the criteria of “public interest” are not always clear, and some verdicts are sealed entirely. Therefore SAP and HACC must not only use this instrument but also convincingly explain its purpose and results to the public.

Quantitative data explain why the public is wary of such agreements. Nearly half of defendants pledged to transfer from 10 thousand to 20 million UAH for the needs of the Armed Forces, yet actual, though mitigated, prison terms were handed down in only three cases. The parties also did not agree on large fines as additional punishment. According to a TI Ukraine survey, 60% of Ukrainians consider real punishment — imprisonment or confiscation of property — the main criterion of effective anti-corruption enforcement.

It is important to understand the nature of the progress outlined here. This is not that HACC has “learned” to work more effectively under unchanged conditions; it rather shows that instruments enacted by the legislator earlier — often imperfectly drafted, with gaps and ambiguities — have finally begun to produce measurable results in practice.

For example, the undoubtedly progressive single-judge proceedings still lack a unified approach to when a defendant may demand that a panel of judges hear the case. And unjustified exceptions to single-judge review for certain categories of officials (for example, cases on inaccurate declaration by MPs) narrow the mechanism’s potential. But even in this incomplete form single-judge review works and, as we see, yields a noticeable effect.

Why the trend toward increased efficiency at HACC is still unstable

The point is that the external problems, resolution of which primarily depends on Parliament, have gone unanswered for years. That means the achieved progress can be lost at any moment. For example, ineffective regulation of statutes of limitation, which we have consistently recorded since 2023, has not only remained unresolved but has worsened. Prolonged consideration of a top-corruption case does not in itself interrupt the statute of limitations, so a proceeding can end not with a finding of guilt but with the person being released because the legally established time has elapsed. Interrupting the statute would mean that after a legally defined event the time count starts anew rather than continuing from the moment it was stopped. Over the past year the number of persons released from liability due to expired limitation periods rose from 13 to 22, and those spared punishment rose from one to nine. The lion’s share of such closures falls under articles 364 and 368 of the Criminal Code — those by which top corruption is often qualified. On this basis, for example, former Minister of Agrarian Policy Mykola Prysyazhnyuk was released from liability; he was suspected of ensuring the illegal victory of private firms in Agrarian Fund tenders amounting to over 521 million UAH, and immediately four figures in the Odessa port corruption case with losses over 21 million UAH were released. Specific problems that led to expirations of limitation periods, and tracking features of how such cases are handled, can be found on our platform “HACC Decided.” Pressure on the court and attempts to revise its institutional capacity — like what happened around the Vlasenko-Buzhanskyi parliamentary investigative commission — also undermine stability. We studied that commission’s report and concluded the document is based on selective analysis and contains many illogical and manipulative findings. HACC’s effectiveness cannot be reduced solely to the ratio of operating costs to funds recovered for the budget. The court’s main task is independent and fair justice in top-corruption cases, and its social result is also measured by the inevitability of punishment and public trust in judicial decisions. At the same time, society has the right to know the financial outcome of HACC’s work: how much the state spends on its maintenance and what amount of confiscations, fines, and reimbursements have not only been imposed but actually executed. The absence of aggregated data does not make this question manipulative; it points to the need for a separate analysis. It is also telling that the head of the investigative commission, Serhiy Vlasenko, publicly claimed pressure and political persecution by NABU, SAP, and HACC even before the commission finished its work, which raises doubts about the impartiality of its conclusions. Such episodes distract the court’s resources and attention from core work. One more detail to state clearly again: HACC is a judicial body, not part of the investigative-prosecutorial tandem. That means the court’s task is not to demonstrate results together with NABU and SAP but first and foremost to impartially assess the quality of their work. And that is why the court must acquit defendants where the prosecution has not proven its case. I remind you that NABU and SAP are only one side of the process, alongside defense attorneys and defendants. The fact that detectives and prosecutors conduct increasingly high-profile investigations into top officials raises the stakes for the court but does not make HACC an “extension” of the investigation. On the contrary, the prominence of these investigations underscores how critically important HACC’s institutional independence is. Although most high-profile cases, like the “Midas” and “Dynasty” cases, are still under investigation, HACC has already demonstrated consistency and impartiality when choosing preventive measures for their defendants. By contrast, the case against Yulia Tymoshenko moved from pre-trial investigation to court proceedings rather quickly. During preparation for its hearing the defense argued that no judge can be impartial toward a politician given her entrenched rhetoric. Preparatory hearings are currently ongoing.

What is needed for this hint of positive change to become a trend

Without legislative changes the positive dynamic will remain fragile. It may fluctuate unpredictably from case to case, from period to period, depending on which proceedings reached their conclusion this year.

To consolidate the trend, Parliament needs to:

For years we have seen MPs failing to adopt these changes — despite them being discussed repeatedly at various levels. Maybe the reason was that more and more MPs themselves became subjects of corruption cases. Maybe the cause is the stagnation of the Rada’s work in the eighth year of this convocation. But these and other arguments can no longer serve as excuses for not instituting necessary reforms.

Instead, new challenges have emerged, related not only to the size of bail in top-corruption cases but also to the origin of funds that third parties and companies post on behalf of suspects. A telling example is the bail for former minister Herman Halushchenko, which the court reduced from 200 to 150 million UAH. According to the investigation, these funds were collected and laundered through dozens of companies and over a hundred financial transactions, after which four companies transferred them to HACC’s special account. Among those suspected of organizing this scheme is former deputy head of the Office of the President Iryna Mudra. Meanwhile the court set Mudra’s bail at 20 million UAH.

These cases raise a broader question: who and at what stage should verify the legality of the bail’s source, and should the court react if money comes from companies with dubious financial histories? The same applies to compensation, reimbursements, and payments to the Armed Forces under plea deals: are the origin of these funds and the payers themselves checked? Relevant legislative initiatives are already registered in the Verkhovna Rada, but their consideration remains pending. We will discuss possible mechanisms for such verification and features of plea deals in top-corruption cases in separate materials.

Trust in preventive measures in top-corruption cases depends on how transparent and justified bail decisions are. The effectiveness of plea deals should be assessed by other criteria: fairness of punishment, the value of incriminating testimony, recovery of resources lost to the state, and outcomes understandable to society.

After returning from recess parliamentarians did not consider a single anti-corruption initiative. They even removed the consideration of the draft Anti-Corruption Strategy for 2026–2030 from the agenda, and the timely adoption of that document — by the end of September — affects not only comprehensive anti-corruption efforts but also Ukraine’s financial support under the Ukraine Facility Plan. This matters for HACC too: without a coherent state anti-corruption policy, the legislative changes the court needs will continue to be adopted situationally or postponed.

While Parliament delays necessary decisions, the progress HACC has achieved will remain fragile.

Author: Andriy Borovyk, Executive Director of Transparency International Ukraine

Source: zn.ua