NABU head Semen Kryvonos claims that the effectiveness of his agency is not measured by the funds returned to the budget. He stated this at a briefing, answering a question about why Ukraine spends many times more money on maintaining NABU than it returns to the state through its work, reports UNIAN.
According to him, there is an indirect economic effect from NABU's activities, but this anti-corruption body does not consider returning corrupt funds to the budget its function.
"And how to assess the economic effect of NABU's actions? Returning funds to the state budget is not our main function," Kryvonos said.
When asked to clarify that NABU was created specifically to combat corruption and the embezzlement of taxpayers' money, its head noted: "there is a corrupt component in the SBI as well, and their funding is greater than ours."
According to the NABU director, the Bureau's activities should not be evaluated with economic metrics, as revenue generation for the budget is not the Bureau's function.
"I want to understand in this question whether NABU's main task is to justify its economic feasibility? That is, to return as much money in a year as is allocated for its existence, for detectives' salaries, for fueling cars, cartridges..." he said.
The NABU director is convinced that the economic reproaches that NABU "earns little" are manipulations by the anti-corruption bureau's adversaries: "But this is precisely what our opponents often manipulate: look, 2.6 billion hryvnias were spent on them, and they returned 600 million. So, everything is measured through economic effect?"
As reported earlier, NABU will receive 2.6 billion UAH in funding per year starting in January, while last year it returned only 680 million UAH to the budget. Without the Bureau, the Ukrainian budget would have an additional almost 2 billion UAH annually. In total, over 10 years of its existence, NABU has spent more than 10.6 billion UAH of Ukrainian taxpayers' money.