NABU establishment and effective operation

All donors required Ukraine to establish a separate independent agency empowered to conduct criminal investigations of senior public officials. The agency meant to resolve the problem of impunity of top officials who are abusing their office and powers to rob the country in amounts equal to the percentage of its GDP.

This is exactly what IMF experts felt when they came to Ukraine in spring 2014 upon the request of the Ukrainian interim government for financial help. They identified almost zero reserves at the accounts of the state treasury – the state budget was literally emptied by Yanukovych and his associates.

To prevent the state funds to be embezzled again the IMF decided to link 17,5 billion USD of its loans to the establishment of the “independent anticorruption agency with broad investigative powers” to bring state officials to justice.

The anticorruption investigative agency also became the key of the EU anticorruption conditionalities to Ukraine reflected in EU-Ukraine State Building Contract, EU Macro-Financial Assistance contracts and the EU-Ukraine Visa Liberalization Action Plan (VLAP).

In October 2014 Ukrainian parliament passed a law establishing such an agency – the National Anticorruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU).

However, conditionalities of foreign donors were not limited to adoption of the legislation only – both the EU and the IMF required its proper implementation. Moreover, the EU (through VLAP mechanism) and the IMF were regularly assessing the level of implementation of the law and regularly updated their requirements regarding NABU.

While all donors emphasized the need to make NABU independent, the IMF was the most specific in clarifying what they mean by “institutional and operational independence from any external influence”. These specific requirements are reflected in separate steps Ukraine committed to make to ensure independence of NABU: special mechanism of NABU director selection, high salaries for NABU staff, exclusive investigative powers over top officials, council of civic control, semi-annual public reporting, external annual audit, etc.

In April 2015 independent selection commission selected NABU director Artem Sytnyk, who immediately started setting up the agency. 

In September 2015 first NABU detectives were selected and later passed trainings.

In December 2015 NABU detectives registered first criminal proceedings.

NABU is under constant attacks of corrupt politicians and officials. There are numerous legislative attempts to interfere with their work and course of investigations.

More details on NABU are available on its webpage.