Donations as Indulgences and Hidden Bail Payments: Summary of Seven 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 empty the ocean with a teaspoon.

For the first time in its history, the pile of pending cases did not grow but decreased by a record five cases, while judges try to clear cases one by one faster than MPs can bury corruption articles under statutes of limitations. Yet the celebratory mood is spoiled by a striking reality: top officials are widely buying indulgences through charitable donations under plea agreements, bail for former ministers is being laundered through hundreds of shell companies right under the court’s nose, and parliament in its eighth year habitually 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 operating. And for the first time in that period, the number of pending cases at HACC did not increase but slightly decreased. The scale of change is still small, but the long-term trend has changed direction for the first time.

The court is gradually improving its operations: single-judge hearings produced results, staffing has been strengthened, and plea agreements with defendants are being used more actively. But it is too early to call this a firmly established trend.

HACC’s progress can be undone by problematic statutes of limitations, procedural abuses, lack of transparency in some plea agreements, and the origin of funds posted as bail. Some of these problems the court cannot resolve on its own — parliamentary decisions, delayed for years, are needed. So it is important to understand not only what helped HACC gain momentum, but also what prevents turning initial positive results into a stable trend.

Where this positive trend in the numbers came from

Most telling, in my view, is not the impression from the numbers themselves but what lies behind them. From the very start, HACC received hundreds of cases, and for years the backlog of pending cases steadily grew — from 149 in 2019 to 327 in 2025. This not only indicated an increasing burden on the court but also gave critics of HACC grounds to doubt whether it should exist at all.

But the development of the court’s practice and work on its mistakes changed the trends. Already in 2025 HACC reviewed a record 114 criminal cases, and in the first half of 2026 the number of cases reviewed (72) for the first time exceeded the number of new cases filed in the court (71). Thus the multi-year accumulation of pending proceedings finally stopped and even declined slightly — from 327 to 322 cases.

As for convictions, in the first half of 2026 HACC issued 65 verdicts: 82 people were convicted and 8 acquitted. Remembering that in 2025 the Anti-Corruption Court overall issued 109 verdicts, the current statistics again show a noticeable increase in the court’s productivity. Meanwhile, the court applied special confiscation to 10 people — thus confiscating almost 71,8 million UAH.

Over seven years HACC has handed down 431 verdicts concerning 601 persons: 398 guilty and 33 not-guilty; 211 guilty verdicts were based on plea agreements. Among those convicted are judges, prosecutors, heads of state enterprises, cabinet members, former and current members of parliament. Actual prison terms were received, among others, by current MP Anatoliy Hunko, former Prosecutor General’s Office official Dmytro Sus, ex-MP Ruslan Solvar, and former director of the Institute of Agroecology of the NAAS, Orest Furdychko.

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

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 were actually deprived of liberty and how many of them are high-ranking officials. Likewise, one should distinguish imposed and actually executed fines, confiscations, and compensations for damage caused to the state. The relevant measure of the Roadmap for the Rule of Law should have been implemented by the end of 2026.

Voluntary payments under agreements, including contributions to the needs of the Armed Forces, have social benefit but are not punishment, and they are also difficult to define as restitution of resources lost by the state. Although they do show how criminal justice tools are being used to help replenish the budget.

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

First, it is worth noting that single-judge hearings, legislatively introduced back in 2024, have proven effective in practice: the share of cases heard by a single judge rose from 22% to 29% of all proceedings pending at HACC.

The difference in duration is telling: single-judge cases conclude on average in 11 months, while collegial hearings last on average nearly 3 years 9 months. In some cases single-judge hearings were even faster: the case of acting director of one state enterprise of the NAAS Institute, Viktoriia Poltavchenko, was heard 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 Anatolii Khmilkivskyi lasted exactly 1 year.

An additional factor that will likely strengthen this dynamic further is the long-awaited staffing increase. Two judges appointed after the second competition to HACC are already presiding over several high-profile proceedings, noticeably relieving the court. And since the President of Ukraine has appointed another 17 winners of the competition for positions at HACC and the Appeals Chamber, the scale of the court’s staffing boost will grow even more. At the same time, the appointment of another 5 judges is still pending.

It is 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 increased to 72 versus 58 in the previous 12 months, although their share among all guilty verdicts slightly decreased — from 66% to 62%.

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

However, the increase in plea agreements alone does not demonstrate their effectiveness. In major corruption cases their value lies not only in a faster verdict but also in incriminating testimony against other participants and organizers of schemes. Such information cannot always be published immediately so as not to harm further investigation. But later it should be assessed whether these 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. Thus 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. Almost half of the accused agreed to transfer from 10 thousand to 20 million UAH for the needs of the Armed Forces, yet actual, though mitigated, prison terms were imposed in only three cases. The parties also did not agree on large fines as an additional punishment. According to a TI Ukraine survey, 60% of Ukrainians consider actual punishment — imprisonment or confiscation of property — the main criterion of effective anti-corruption efforts.

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

For example, the unquestionably progressive single-judge hearing still lacks a uniform approach to when an accused can demand that a panel of judges hear the case. And unjustified exceptions allowing single-judge hearings for certain categories of officials (for example, cases of inaccurate asset declarations by MPs) narrow the potential of this mechanism. But even in this unfinished form, single-judge hearings work and, as we can see, produce a tangible effect.

Why the trend toward increased efficiency at HACC remains unstable

The point is that the external problems whose resolution primarily depends on parliament have gone unaddressed for years. That means the progress achieved can be lost at any moment. For example, ineffective regulation of statutes of limitations, which we have been documenting since 2023, has not only remained unresolved but worsened. Lengthy consideration of a top-corruption case does not itself interrupt the running of the statute of limitations, so proceedings can end not with a guilty verdict but with the release of the person because the legally established time has expired. Interrupting the statute would mean that after a legally defined event its count starts anew rather than continuing from the moment it was stopped. Over the past year the number of people released from liability due to expired statutes has increased 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 — the provisions under which top corruption is often qualified. On this ground, for example, former Minister of Agrarian Policy Mykola Prysyazhniuk was released, who was suspected of ensuring illegal victories for private firms in Agrarian Fund tenders totaling over 521 million UAH, and immediately four defendants in the corruption case at Odesa port with damages over 21 million UAH. You can read about specific problems that led to statutes of limitations lapsing and generally track peculiarities of handling such cases on our platform “HACC Decided”. Pressure on the court and attempts to revise its institutional capacity — like what happened around the Vlasenko-Buzhanskyi temporary investigative commission — also do not add stability. We studied that commission’s report and concluded that the document is based on selective analysis and contains many illogical and manipulative conclusions. HACC’s effectiveness cannot be reduced only to the ratio of its maintenance costs to funds recovered to 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, the public has the right to know the financial outcome of HACC’s work: how much the state spends on its maintenance and what volume of confiscations, fines, and compensations have not only been imposed but actually executed. The absence of aggregated data does not make this question manipulative but indicates the need for a separate analysis. It is also telling that the head of the temporary commission, Serhii Vlasenko, publicly spoke of pressure and political persecution from NABU, SAP, and HACC even before the commission completed its work, which raises doubts about the impartiality of its conclusions. Such episodes divert the court’s resources and attention from its 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 produce results together with NABU and SAP, but primarily to impartially assess the quality of their work. And that is why, among other things, the court must acquit defendants where the prosecution has not proven its case. I would remind you that NABU and SAP are only one side of the process, alongside defense attorneys and defendants. The fact that detectives and prosecutors are conducting 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 high profile of these investigations underscores how critically important the Anti-Corruption Court’s institutional independence is. Although most high-profile proceedings, like the “Midas” and “Dynasty” cases, are still at the investigation stage, HACC has already demonstrated consistency and impartiality at the stage of imposing preventive measures for their defendants. By contrast, the case accusing Yulia Tymoshenko moved fairly quickly from pre-trial investigation to trial. During preparations for its hearing, the defense argued that no judge could be impartial toward politics because of her consistent rhetoric. A preparatory hearing is currently ongoing there.

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

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

To consolidate the trend, parliament needs to:

For years we have watched legislators fail to adopt these changes — despite repeated discussions at various levels. Perhaps the reason was that more and more MPs themselves became subjects of corruption cases. Perhaps it was stagnation in the Verkhovna Rada’s work in its eighth year. But these and other arguments can no longer serve as excuses for failing to implement necessary changes.

New challenges have emerged, related not only to the amount 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 enterprises and over a hundred financial transactions, after which four companies transferred them to HACC’s special account. Among the persons the investigation suspects of organizing this scheme is former deputy head of the Office of the President Iryna Mudra. At the same time the court set Mudra’s own bail at 20 million UAH.

These cases raise a broader question: who and at what stage should verify the legality of the bail’s origin, and should the court react if money comes from companies with dubious financial histories? The same applies to compensations, restitutions, and payments to the Armed Forces under plea agreements: 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 detail possible mechanisms for such checks and the specifics of plea agreements in top-corruption cases in separate materials.

How transparent and well-founded bail decisions are will determine trust in preventive measures in top-corruption cases. The effectiveness of plea agreements should be assessed by other criteria: fairness of punishment, usefulness of incriminating testimony, restitution to the state of lost resources, and a result understandable to the public.

After returning from recess, parliament did not consider a single anti-corruption initiative. They even removed consideration of the Anti-Corruption Strategy project for 2026–2030 from the agenda, and the timely adoption of this 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 as well: without a coherent state anti-corruption policy, the legislative changes the court needs will continue to be adopted situationally or deferred.

While parliament postpones necessary decisions, the progress HACC has achieved will remain fragile.

Author: Andrii Borovyk, Executive Director, Transparency International Ukraine

Source: zn.ua