Illustrative photo © Bureau of Economic Security According to the director of the BEB, the approach to all law enforcement agencies should be the same, not selective.
Today, depriving the Bureau of Economic Security of the opportunity to initiate criminal cases is an encroachment on the institutional capacity of the BEB. And although the idea of establishing order by introducing investigative powers is not bad, all bodies should be equal in this matter, said in the second part of the interview with ZN.UA, BEB Director Oleksandr Tsyvinsky, whom Yulia Samayeva and Inna Vedernikova spoke with.
We are talking about an amendment to bill No. 12439, which was supported in closed session by the Verkhovna Rada's Law Enforcement Committee chaired by Serhiy Ionushas on August 27. Through it, the BEB wants to take away and give the prosecutor's office the opportunity 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. In essence, this will block the work of the Bureau of Economic Security.
” In the current version, this is really depriving the BEB of the capabilities that it currently has . At the same time, they will remain in other bodies, and they will be taken away from the BEB. However, the approach should be the same for everyone, not selective . So, of course, I would like it to be correct. However, the problem with the investigation exists, now there is a unique chance to solve it. Even before my appointment, there were facts not only in the BEB, but also in other bodies, when proceedings were registered for an unclear reason. Mass searches, summonses were carried out, business was indignant that instead of investigations, some “other measures” were being carried out. Now this is a reaction to those business indignations,” Tsyvinsky noted.
At the same time, he is convinced that after six months of competition with international partners, a new head was elected and a decision was made to reboot the BEB, the Bureau needs to be given time to prove itself . According to Tsyvinsky, this could be a year before the first audit of the work. And if after this year the registration of the investigation remains unclear, then we can already talk about discretion for the BEB .
” At the moment, I believe that we should all be equal . If other bodies can introduce their own investigation, why can't the BEB? However, the idea itself to bring order to the introduction is quite good . From my experience working at NABU, I can say: when other bodies introduced articles under investigation by NABU and investigated them, then problems with the evidence base arose chronically,” Tsyvinsky noted.
Read the first part of the interview at the link.
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.
