The law provides criminal penalties for corruption. Authorities did not effectively implement the law, and many officials engaged in corrupt practices with impunity. While the number of reports of government corruption was low, corruption remained pervasive at all levels in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government.

On June 26, the president signed the Law on the High Anticorruption Court (HACC); on August 2, he signed an amendment to the law that clarified the HACC appeals processes. Observers noted that the HACC’s creation completed the country’s system of bodies to fight high-level corruption. Its success will depend on the integrity of the selection procedures for its judges as well as on the effectiveness and independence of the other two previously created anticorruption agencies, the National Anticorruption Bureau (NABU) and the Special Anticorruption Prosecutor (SAP). The process for selecting HACC judges began in August. In November anticorruption watchdogs expressed concern about apparent limitations on the work of an international expert panel that the law mandates participate in the HACC judge selection process to ensure the integrity of candidates.

The new independent anticorruption bodies faced political pressure that undermined public trust, raised concern about the government’s commitment to fighting corruption, and threatened the viability of the institutions. Anticorruption watchdogs noted that several appointments to NABU’s audit board during the year were seen as personally loyal to the president and posing a threat to NABU’s independence. Observers alleged that the release of leaked conversations by the head of SAP in early 2018 indicated he had engaged in witness tampering and obstruction of justice. He refused to resign, was not disciplined by the Prosecutor General or prosecutorial body, and allegedly proceeded to undermine NABU investigations, weakening efforts to hold high-ranking officials to account.

Corruption: While the government publicized several attempts to combat corruption, it remained a serious problem for citizens and businesses alike.

On February 13, NABU arrested Odesa Mayor Hennadiy Trukhanov and three city council deputies, who were charged with embezzlement and causing financial damage to the state. He was released on bail on February 15. According to NABU, Trukhanov and his associates profited from a fraud scheme in which the Odesa city government bought a building from a fictitious private company for 185 million hryvnias ($6.9 million) in 2016. That company, allegedly beneficially owned by Trukhanov and associates, had allegedly bought the building just months earlier from the Odesa city government for just 11.5 million hryvnias ($430,000) at an auction and had made millions of dollars in illicit profit from the resale. A court began reviewing the case on November 14.

Financial Disclosure: The law mandates the filing of income and expenditure declarations by public officials, and a special review process allows for public access to declarations and sets penalties for either not filing or filing a false declaration. By law, the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption (NAPC) is responsible for reviewing financial declarations, monitoring the income and expenditures of high-level officials, and checking party finances. Observers increasingly questioned, however, whether the NAPC had the capacity and independence to fulfill this function, noting that in practice NABU had proven to be more effective for oversight of declarations, even though this was not its core mandate. In July, Transparency International Ukraine noted that the NAPC had fully reviewed only 300 declarations out of 2.5 million that had been submitted and had identified multiple serious holes in its verification procedures. On September 25, the NAPC launched “automated” verification of declarations, which would purportedly allow easier identification of declarations at “high risk’ of fraud. Observers noted serious flaws in this automated procedure and doubted it would result in improved verification. Observers noted that the NAPC’s December announcement that it would open criminal cases regarding party financing against the lead opposition party Batkivshchyna and several minor parties after years of general inactivity raised concerns that it might be used for political purposes ahead of the 2019 election cycle.

Corruption: There were multiple reports during the year of systemic rampant corruption among Crimean “officeholders,” including through embezzlement of Russian state funds allocated to support the occupation. For example on October 17, Russian police in Moscow arrested Vitaliy Nakhlupin, the “deputy prime minister” of Crimea, and charged him with taking unspecified bribes, reported by media to be related to the construction of the Kerch bridge and other road construction projects.