On November 17, 2024, i.e. in a few days, the deadline for submitting documents for participation in the competition to elect members of the Public Oversight Council at the State Bureau of Investigation expires. And more recently, at the end of October 2024, a new composition of the Public Oversight Council at the Bureau of Economic Security was elected by voting.
Znaj.ua wrote about it on website.
There are many more public councils that have been elected under different bodies and at different times - the Public Council at the Asset Recovery and Management Agency (January 2020), the Public Control Council at the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (almost every year), the Public Anti-Corruption Council at the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine (March 2023) - but it is not the list itself that is important, but understanding what all these councils have in common. It is easy to see that what unites all this variety of people willing to participate in the work of at least one council is the desire of certain types of activists to "join" the management of at least something and control over anything, as long as it is under the authority of the government. And one of the most active "activist factories" is the famous NGO - the Ukrainian Bar Association.
It is probably not a mistake to say that no election of public councils has ever been without UBA members.
By the way, all members of the Association are invited to vote for the necessary members.
But the UBA Board chooses who to vote for.
It is interesting that for the most part, and as a rule, very "interesting" members are elected: all of them are usually either graduates of the "Advocate of the Future" Program (UBA project) or have held positions of national experts in one of the Council of Europe projects (usually grant providers that are "mastered" by the UBA).
And the meaning of this activity is simple: to sell their services as "heralds of truth and justice" as expensively as possible, but in fact to sing and dance to those who order the music, that is, in other words, the members of the UBA are not at all concerned with such trifles as selling their conscience to anyone who wants to buy it.
Is this really possible? Why not, if we consider two very good reasons: 1) the opportunity to "earn money," and 2) the opportunity to "gain weight and authority." It is clear that the end of such "activity" justifies all means.
The most recent example is the so-called Shadow Report to Chapter 23 "Justice and Fundamental Rights", which the UBA is proud of as perhaps its most important achievement of the recent period.
However, it turned out that this report is nothing more than a compilation of rumors and slander, collected on 500 pages to deceive representatives of the European Union.
The publication of this work came as a real shock to representatives of all stakeholders (interested and influential parties) without exception: from the Ministry of Justice to the judiciary and the National Bar Association of Ukraine (examples of reactions are here, and here).
The reaction of the National School of Judges was frank and direct: "The report attempts to audit the state of existing problems in the justice system. ... the report contains biased and unbiased, and sometimes even outright incompetent assessments and conclusions".
Moreover, it turned out that instead of studying, the "experts" from the public sector, including the UBA, based their conclusions on... interviews with other representatives of the public sector. That is, in other words, they talked to themselves, shared rumors and preferences, and then compiled a report based on this. The executors did not ask for official comments or requests from either government agencies, the judiciary, or bar self-government bodies, which makes the information in the report unbalanced and questionable.
There is also information in the media that the "shadow" on Ukrainian justice, prosecution, and the bar cost €1,054,304. This is an EU project called Civil Society for Ukraine's Post-War Recovery and EU Readiness. The project was intended "to increase the capacity of the Government and Parliament to overcome the consequences of the war and on the path to Ukraine's EU membership by providing expert and communication support from civil society organizations in the development and implementation of relevant laws and policies."
In particular, the EU expected expertise in the following areas
- development of a quality reintegration policy for refugees and IDPs,
- restoration of legitimate public administration in the territories liberated from occupation,
- overcoming military, post-war and other barriers to access to justice,
- improving public procurement policy and anti-corruption infrastructure,
- development of economic reforms in line with military and post-war challenges.
However, in fact, none of these issues was ever disclosed, while all the funds were "used" by the so-called "circle of friends" of Andriy Vyshnevsky, who once ran for the President of the UBA, is the founder of another "co-accountable" organization together with another President of the UBA, and is connected to other NGOs through his wife or colleagues.
It is obvious that the UBA received the most funds, as it prepared half of the report's sections:
- Judicial Reform (Agency for Legislative Initiatives);
- Fighting corruption (Transparency International Ukraine);
- Protection of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms (ZMINA Human Rights Center);
- Reform of the Prosecutor's Office (Advocate of the Future);
- Reform of the Bar (Advocate of the Future);
- Reform of legal education (Ukrainian Bar Association).
When it comes to spending significant funds from international donors, it is important to have transparency and expediency of every euro spent. In the case of this report, the question remains: does its cost really correspond to the results it brings? If the document is based on unverified rumors and does not contain useful content for reforms, then the justification for using these funds is questionable.
At the same time, it is also obvious that such "reporting" has become a very successful cash grab for the Association, as reported by the head of the UBA Mykola Stetsenko on October 31, 2024.
Please note that the so-called "projects" of the UBA allowed to earn more than UAH 10 million in 9 months of 2024! How can this be compared to membership and charitable contributions, which together allowed to raise 5 times less money - barely UAH 1.7 million? Another UAH 3 million was brought in by the "partner" program - these are contributions from those whom the Association advertises as its reliable partners and promotes to various public councils.
It is easy to see that the UBA's income in 2018 was much more modest, with the lion's share of revenues coming from charitable and membership fees, along with student events.
But let's go back to 2024. While the UBA has already received millions of hryvnias from donors for the Legal Education Reform section, the Advocate of the Future Program has probably paid for itself several years in advance (for the Bar Reform and Prosecution Reform sections, respectively).
And we shouldn't think that the Advocate of the Future is some other people.
According to the AUDIT REPORT on the activities of the All-Ukrainian Public Organization "Ukrainian Bar Association" for the period from 01.10.2016 to 31.10.2018, conducted by Audit-Optim PE, it was the UBA that implemented the " Advocate of the Future" project with the support of the Canadian government.
The same audit report also contains no less interesting information about the structure of the UBA, which allows it to perfectly adapt to any task - the UBA has sections of any direction, and it is not only about advocacy and prosecution.
An analysis of reports and other documents related to the UBA's activities shows that the Association does not hesitate to manipulate even such a simple indicator as its own importance and representation. For example, in their appeals to various government agencies, the UBA does not forget to emphasize that they represent the opinion of more than 7000 lawyers (according to M. Stetsenko, as of October 2024, there were 7321 members). However, a detailed analysis shows that the Ukrainian Bar Association has only 4,978 real members, as all the others are "counted" as candidates for membership.
To better understand the quality of representation, we should also mention the largest wing of the Association - the so-called Students' League, which additionally "takes away" almost 2000 members from the professional community. So is it any wonder that in 2018 there were less than 50 people in the section of "prosecutors"? However, this has never stopped the UBA from talking about "thousands" of members of their organization and recommending various reforms "developed by professionals".
In general, it is worth noting that almost all projects from the UBA turn out to be just good PR. For example, the monitoring of war crimes cases for the year of work in the relevant report took as much as 9 pages! And exactly the same number of pages was allocated for the "QUESTIONNAIRE" section (basically a table with questions). The report is here.
Almost nothing has been heard about the charity project to help lawyers and their families. We were lucky enough to find only one news item on the Internet about helping wounded soldier Gennadiy, a former employee of Shevchenko, Didkovsky and Partners (now ASTERS). A noble and worthy deed, except for the fact that it was the firm of the UBA founder Igor Shevchenko and current Board member Oleksiy Didkovskiy.
The UBA project "Initiative Group for the Protection of Advocates' Rights" has long since come to an end. It is interesting that the group worked for a little less than two years, and, by a strange coincidence, at the time when the rights of the then President of the UBA Denys Bugai were allegedly violated. And after 2019, either the rights of lawyers are no longer violated (in fact, even during the military year of 2023, more than 98 appeals to the UNBA Committee on the Protection of the Rights of Lawyers were registered), or the UNBA no longer considers this area a priority.
Instead, the previously mentioned "Advocate of the Future" project has been flourishing for several years now, probably not least because of its extremely high profit margin. Interestingly, this project is often used as a platform for criticism. The position of the former project manager and member of the UBA Board Andriy Vyshnevsky, who for several years in a row has been talking about the "deplorable state of the Ukrainian bar", is just one example. Oddly enough, while he was a strong advocate for reforming the bar, Vyshnevsky himself often preferred to work in the Ministry of Justice or the National Agency on Corruption Prevention (and surprisingly, he was dismissed from all of them in disgrace!).
Moreover, the entire UBA team begins to speak with one voice about reforming the bar only when it is beneficial to someone close to them (including those in the offices on Bankova Street). This is what happened, for example, when the draft law No. 9055 was promoted in 2019.
The association that supported this draft law did not even hide the fact that it was working to promote the document in close cooperation with the Presidential Administration, in fact seeking to take over the bar.
We would like to remind you that the project was defeated only after a year of intense work by the Bar Council of Ukraine a part of the Ukrainian National Bar Association.
Moreover, during the media support of this project, the UBA did not shy away from using rumors, backroom gossip and speculation, and it seems that the formation of rumors is almost the main form of the UBA's activity.
In general, analyzing the activities of the UBA, one can easily see that among all the reforms the Association is working on, the reform of the Bar occupies a key position. Only a few publications can be found on the reform of legal education over the past 20 years, while all UBA Presidents, without exception, have spoken about the "remaking" of the bar:
- "A working meeting was held between the leadership of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Legal Policy - Chairman of the Committee Vasyl Onopenko and his first deputy Mykola Onyshchuk - and President of the Ukrainian Bar Association Igor Shevchenko. During the meeting, the main principles of reforming the Ukrainian Bar were discussed" (2005),
- President of the Ukrainian Bar Association Serhiy Konnov proposes new approaches to reforming the Bar (2008),
- V. Zagariya, President of the Ukrainian Bar Association: "There are different visions of the development of bar self-government" (2012),
- The Ukrainian Bar Association invites you to the presentation of key provisions of the draft amendments to the Law of Ukraine "On the Bar and Practice of Law" (2016),
- President of the UBA Andriy Stelmashchuk: "Judicial reform cannot be carried out without reform of the law enforcement system and the bar" (2017),
- Denys Bugay: "Reform of the Bar has been and remains our priority. We, the attorneys, should not be afraid of changes" (2018),
- Anna Ogrenchuk: "We want UBA members to participate in all reform processes..." (2021),
- Mykola Stetsenko: "Now is the time for changes and reforms, and it is the UBA that can lead this process" (2023).
It even went so far that one of the current members of the UBA Board, lawyer Ilya Kostin, during the presentation of his goal, said that he wanted to "destroy the bar." Literally, it sounded like this: "Although I am running for election as a member of the Board from the section of civil servants, I am now a military servant and I plan to deal with the issues of military law in the first place, and in the second place, with the issue of the Bar, the current system of which must be destroyed."
https://uba.ua/documents/1PR/Vybory_2023/Kandydaty/Kostin_Ilya.pdf
In his commentary to the Yurydychna Gazeta, Kostin directly states: "The bar self-government needs not even a reboot, but the destruction of this system..."
However, the UBA has always appreciated such "scandalizers" as Ilya Kostin, who for some reason always agreed to play the role of "critic of everything and everyone." In fact, even Kostin was elected to the Bar Council of the Kyiv Region solely under the patronage of his friend Valentyn Zagariya, who had been President of the Ukrainian Bar Association since 2011 and Chairman of the High Qualification and Disciplinary Commission of the UNBA between 2012 and 2015. Kostin himself was a member of the UBA from the beginning of its creation (he was registered under number 13).
Valentyn Zagariya, on the other hand, also has several dark spots in his biography. He started out as the head of the legal department at an investment fund, where he met Valeriy Pysarenko (who maintained close ties with the scandalous Andriy Portnov), with whom they set up the Spenser & Kauffmann law firm, in which Pysarenko transferred his share to Zagariya in 2006 when he became an MP. Since then, Zagariya has been considered both a partner of Pysarenko and a trusted manager in several firms registered to other people. Zagariya and Pysarenko did not even hide their connection very well: for example, the office of Spenser & Kauffmann once housed the reception of the MP Pysarenko. And when Pysarenko defected to the Party of Regions, he continued to actively promote his business partner: in 2011, Zagariya was elected as President of the UBA.
In 2012, Zagariya and Pysarenko were involved in a scandalous war over the Kyiv SkyMall shopping center, waged by Hillary Teder and Tomas Fiala on the one hand, and Andriy Adamovskyi and Oleksandr Granovsky on the other.
It is important to understand that almost all the leaders of the NGO Ukrainian Bar Association have always had a certain scandalous trail in their activities.
For example, the first President of the UBA, Ihor Shevchenko, is associated with the scandalous Oleksandr Onyshchenko. In the 90s, Onishchenko himself had the surname Kadyrov and was, according to the Kontrakty publication, a "brigadier" in the organized crime group of the criminal authoritative Kisel. In 2015, Ihor Shevchenko became involved in several corruption scandals. At the time, Oleh Lyashko claimed that Shevchenko's post as minister was bought by Oleksandr Onyshchenko for $5 million. And the minister had neither the experience nor the education that would have been appropriate for the position.
Oleksiy Didkovskiy, Ihor Shevchenko's business partner and "eternal" CFO of the UBA is also involved in corruption scandals. For example, StopCor investigated whether bribes were transferred to judges through Didkovskyi, as it was known for certain that in 2019, Deputy Head of the National Bank Kateryna Rozhkova paid Oleksii Didkovskyi UAH 583 million through PrivatBank, allegedly for legal services.
It is likely that a significant amount of work in the UBA was financed from these funds.
The information that "the police gained access to the accounting records of the law firms AEQUO and ASTERS in the case of corruption in the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine during Terentyev's tenure" also dates back to the same period.
If we compare the dates of these investigations with the beginning of the media promotion of draft law 9055, we can assume that the NGO Ukrainian Bar Association made attempts to take over the bar not least because it felt threatened with the termination of funding as such.
No less scandalous was Anna Ogrenchuk, the President of the UBA in 2021-2023. Her husband, Andriy Dovbenko, the former "watchdog of the Ministry of Justice," is now wanted for corruption. And among her friends are the former head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, Andriy Bohdan, and a Kyiv developer, "Zelensky's curator," Andriy Vavrysh. So once again, there is a clear relationship between the leadership of the UBA and the government offices. Read more about it here and here.
However, the most odious head of the UBA will long remain lawyer Denys Buhai, who served as the UBA president from 2013 to 2017 and from 2019 to 2021.
The first mention of Mr. Denys's controversial personality appeared in 2014, when it was reported that he had close ties to the fugitive oligarch Serhiy Kurchenko, who was called "Yanukovych's wallet." Since 2012, Bugay has been involved in Kurchenko's most controversial deals, the acquisition of "white assets." Ukrainian Media Holding, Brokbusinessbank, and the Metalist football club.
In 2019, as President of the UBA, D. Buhai began to promote the previously mentioned draft law 9055. There is no point in repeating this initiative, but it is worth recalling how the media reported on it at the time.
In 2022, Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, and Denys Bugai began to demonstrate an active civic position on social media. However, it is worth noting that even after the seizure of Crimea and the occupation of Donbas, companies associated with Russia actively cooperated with Bugay's law firm (we can assume that they still maintain business ties). Among these companies are Quarter partners, Vioil, Sumy MNPO, Mykolaiv Alumina Plant, and Svitland Development. The network has repeatedly spread information about the lawyer's family ties to the high treasoner Serhii Ganzha, a former Security Service of Ukraine (it is said that Denys Buhai is married to the daughter of the former Security Service officer Olha).
Of course, lawyer Bugay denies any connection with Ganzha (he says it's all gossip), but there is no smoke without fire.
And in fact, shouldn't we be looking for an answer to the question of who the Ukrainian Bar Association really "serves" by having such leaders? And what is the real goal of these rather dubious lawyers? And should the European Union listen to the shadow reports of the Association with such a dubious background?
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