Bill No. 12374-d on the reform of the National Agency for Investigation and Management of Assets (ARMA) is prepared for the second reading, but anti-corruption bodies are already alarmed. The document revealed a number of amendments that can complicate the fight against illegal enrichment and monitor the assets of officials formality.
Despite the fact that the profile committee of the Verkhovna Rada rejected the dangerous edits on March 24, the deputies may try to "stretch" them while voting in the hall. The National Anti -Corruption Agency (NAPC) and ARMA have already opposed these changes, emphasizing that they can seriously weaken anti -corruption mechanisms.
Among the key amendments that caused resonance are changes in monitoring the lifestyle of government officials.
If the Parliament supports these amendments, the NAPC will lose the ability to check the property of officials, which has already been featured in preliminary inspections. That is, if after the first check new evidence of the reduced value of assets or fictitious agreements will appear, it will be almost impossible to prove illegal enrichment.
The Corruption Center (CPC) notes that it will open a hole for hiding real estate, cars and cash assets, since the NAPC will be able to re -check only those data confirmed by a court sentence.
There is also an amendment that forbids the assets purchased by the official or his family before appointing for public service. This will allow legalization of previously hidden wealth, which allegedly "belonged" to the official even before his career in the authorities.
Another controversial editing block (889, 890, 892) provides that information in declarations must be filled automatically from the state registers, and the declarant himself is not obliged to check their accuracy.
That is, if inaccuracies appear in the electronic declaration or if there are simply no information about certain assets in the state registers, the official will not be responsible.
NAPC warns that this will destroy the entire electronic declaration system, because the main source of property information is not the registers, but the primary documents. For example, if the apartment was obtained in the 1990s and there is no information about it in modern databases, it can be easily hidden from declaration.
ARMA and NAPC openly criticized the attempts to "hide" these edits in the bill. ARMA Chairman Olena Duma stated that the document contains rules that threaten the effectiveness of anti -corruption mechanisms and have nothing to do with the reform of the ARMA.
According to NAPC representatives, new changes are actually destroying the official lifestyle tool of officials, which allowed the agency to transfer to the Specialized Anti -Corruption Prosecutor's Office 61 cases in the amount of more than UAH 231 million.
In general, the amount of unreasonable assets revealed through this mechanism exceeds UAH 1.5 billion. If the Parliament approves controversial amendments, such investigations will be impossible.
The Center for Combating Corruption indicates that among the main lobbyists of the changes - MP from the Motherland Sergey Vlasenko and party leader Yulia Tymoshenko. Anti -corruption is afraid that during the vote, these and other "harmful" norms can be introduced directly in the session hall without prior discussion.
The danger is that formally the bill is aimed at reforming ARMA within the limits of Ukraine's liabilities to the EU (Ukraine Facility). But with the necessary changes there, they try to add norms that weaken the fight against corruption.
If these changes are approved, it can stop the top -level corruption investigations and create new loopholes for officials who want to hide illegal assets.
