The head of the Asset Recovery and Management Agency, Olena Duma, has demonstrated an unwillingness to be controlled by the public throughout her tenure, and now that the public council under ARMA has not been operating for almost three months, she has room for abuse. This was stated by Ihor Chobitko, former chairman of the Public Council under the ARMA, in an exclusive commentary to UNN.
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Almost three months ago, all members of the ARMA Public Council decided to resign due to systematic violations of the law by the ARMA leadership regarding public involvement in its activities. The council members stated that their appeals were regularly ignored and access to discussions of regulations was blocked. This deprived the public of the opportunity to exercise real control over the management of seized property.
“Throughout our communication with the Head of ARMA, we have seen her unwillingness to be controlled by the public. Therefore, all our inquiries were ignored, or answers were provided that were not relevant to the substance of the inquiries,” Chobitko said.
According to him, Olena Duma systematically ignored appeals to announce competitions for the election of council members, which effectively paralyzed its work.
It was supposed to comply with the Cabinet of Ministers' resolution, announce a competition and select a new member to replace the one whose powers were terminated, but it did not do so. And there are minutes of the meetings of the public council on the ARMA website, where we appealed to the head of the National Agency on this issue to announce a competition and select the required number of members of the public council, which is 9 according to the law. I believe that this inaction is, so to speak, systemic. Because during the entire period of time since she took up her duties, she has not elected a single member of the public council
According to Chobitko, the lack of public scrutiny allows the agency to take actions that may not be in line with the law.
“This is to her advantage, because she has actually deprived the public of control, because it is through the public council that, according to the law on ARMA, public control is exercised over the national agency - over its activities, including the use of budget funds, the selection of civil servants to vacant positions and the management of seized assets. Therefore, it is to its advantage to keep the public from knowing what is going on. And we see that recently there have been many challenges to this institution regarding the illegality of its actions, including recent publications on “Gulliver”and criminal proceedings regarding disabilities. The activities of the public council prevent the head of the agency from taking actions that do not actually comply with the requirements of the ARMA law,” he added.
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On the occasion of the 9th anniversary of the ARMA's creation, Transparency International Ukraine statedthat the agency is currently in need of significant reform and does not meet the European standards for which it was created. The anti-corruption activists pointed out that quite often there is “contradictory communication from the ARMA or its officials, combined with populism, violation of the presumption of innocence and lack of understanding of the competence of state bodies”.
The Asset Recovery and Management Agency decided not to comment on Transparency International Ukraine's remarks about “contradictory communication” on the part of the agency's officials, and instead spoke about their “achievements” in drafting laws.
This is not the only criticism of the ARMA due to populism. Earlier, experts emphasizedthat the agency focuses more on politically high-profile cases related to oligarchs than on the effective preservation and management of transferred assets. It is worth noting that Olena Duma in her public speeches has repeatedly emphasized the transfer of assets of oligarchs Dmytro Firtash, Mikhail Fridman and Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska to ARMA among the “achievements” of her work.