© Bureau of Economic Security The amendment takes away the right of the BEB to open cases against businesses without the consent of the prosecutor's office.
The Verkhovna Rada Committee on Law Enforcement Affairs, chaired by Serhiy Ionushas, at a closed-door meeting on August 27, supported an amendment to draft law No. 12439, which will essentially block the work of the Bureau of Economic Security, said Martyna Bohuslavets, head of the Anti-Corruption Center “Border”.
In particular, through this amendment, the BEB wants to take away and give the prosecutor's office the ability to initiate criminal cases committed by officials of business entities. The amendment also allows only the head of the prosecutor's office to enter such information into the Unified Register of Pre-Trial Investigations.
As Boguslawets emphasized, in practice this means that:
- Criminal cases against businesses under investigation by the BEB may be initiated only by decision of the Prosecutor General, his deputies, or heads of regional prosecutors' offices;
- heads of prosecutors' offices will actually manually determine which cases to open and which not;
- The BEB will be deprived of the authority to initiate criminal proceedings unless it is approved by the prosecutor's office.
“This is how the unreformed prosecutor's office is planned to be used to block the work of the BEB,” the lawyer noted.
Bohuslavets added that they want to put Bill No. 12439, as well as this amendment, to a vote in the Rada in the second reading soon and urges deputies not to vote for it.
“Help us block this, otherwise it will nullify all efforts to restart the BEB and allow the Bureau to finally work independently,” the activist said.
As a reminder, on August 6 – after a scandal that lasted a month and a half – the government finally appointed Oleksandr Tsyvinsky as the director of the Bureau of Economic Security. The competition commission elected Tsyvinsky as the director of the BEB back on June 24. But on July 7 it became known that the government decided to reject this decision. After some time, the commission re-submitted the corresponding candidacy – allegedly, Tsyvinsky fully meets the requirements stipulated by the law – and stopped working.
The head of the Anti-Corruption Center “Border” Martyna Bohuslavets said that the OP prevented the appointment of any of the two representatives of the newly independent NABU as the director of the BEB, although these candidates had the least questions about integrity. In her article “ They are trying to disrupt the competition for the selection of the BEB director through the courts, ” Bohuslavets analyzed the scheme to block the long-awaited reboot of the bureau.
