An international audit has found some serious issues at the NABU: no investigations in the defense sector and a bloated staff with salaries of 100,000 hryvnia, according to an expert

An international commission has finally completed its audit of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), revealing numerous shortcomings and violations. The bureau must be dissolved because it cannot be reformed, political expert Oleg Postenak commented on the published report on the results of an external independent assessment of NABU.

"After the diagnosis, which was voiced even by loyal internationalists and supported by the Ukrainian media, it is impossible to continue pretending that NABU only needs 'reforms'. NABU is an institutional mistake that cannot be corrected by any cosmetic reforms. The bureau must be dissolved, not reformed," Postenak wrote.

The expert cited the commission's findings, which point to significant problems within NABU. In particular, he noted that the Bureau chronically leaks information, but no effective criminal investigation has been conducted as a result. In addition, the NABU staff is constantly growing, but despite this, detectives and management constantly complain about a lack of manpower for "big" investigations. And, most importantly, in 2023, the Bureau brought one suspicion in the field of defense, and in 2024 – none.

"According to public data, in 2024, UAH 1.9 billion was spent from the state budget on maintaining NABU, while the Bureau's activities led to the return of only UAH 823 million from corrupt officials. In other words, 2.2 times more was spent than was returned to the state! Ukraine is at war, millions of Ukrainians are involved in defense, and the Bureau lacks either the resources or, more likely, the desire to deal with truly important matters. However, no one is forgetting to expand the staff and pay salaries to more than 100,000 people!" he emphasized.

The expert noted that the report of international experts should be supplemented with scandals that have rocked the NABU in recent months: the arrest of a Bureau representative for manufacturing and selling drugs, the purchase of luxury cars and elite real estate by detective Mykhailo Romaniuk for his relatives, the concealment of millions in cryptocurrency by detectives, the coercion of witnesses into intimate relationships, and the escape of detective Arshavin, a bearer of state secrets, to Romania.

"After 10 years of existence and hundreds of millions of euros in international aid, Ukraine has finally received its first external audit of NABU. One can only imagine what the result would have been if the commission had real teeth and no desire to gloss over the Bureau's constant failures," the expert concluded.

As reported, in September 2024, the Cabinet of Ministers appointed a Commission of Foreign Experts to conduct an external independent assessment of NABU. It was only on November 18 that this commission met for the first time in the Bureau's more than nine years of existence. The commission decided to limit itself to the period from the appointment of the current director of the Bureau (March 6, 2023) to November 18, 2024. In this regard, Ukrainian lawyers demanded an independent assessment of the NABU's work for the entire period of its existence. However, this was never done.

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