At the end of 2019, materials from personnel commissions that conducted the attestation of investigators and prosecutors were destroyed in what was then the Prosecutor General's Office. This caused a stir at the time, as those who tried to appeal the commission's decisions in court often faced the fact that instead of attestation results, they received a copy of the act of destruction of documents. In response to an inquiry from UNN, the Office of the Prosecutor General replied that a relevant investigation was underway.
I inform you that investigators of the Main Investigation Department of the State Bureau of Investigation, under the procedural guidance of prosecutors of the General Inspectorate of the Office of the Prosecutor General, are conducting a pre-trial investigation in criminal proceedings regarding the possible unlawful actions of officials of the Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine on the grounds of criminal offenses provided for in Part 1 of Article 365, Part 2 of Article 364 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.
During the pre-trial investigation, the circumstances of the destruction in December 2019 of the attestation materials of prosecutors and investigators of the Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine, conducted by six personnel commissions of the Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine, are being established. The OGP reported that 610 prosecutors and investigators successfully passed the attestation whose materials were destroyed, and 729 employees did not pass the attestation and were dismissed from the prosecutor's office.
According to a copy of the act of destruction of materials dated 27.12.2019, signed by the heads of the personnel commissions, it appears that the materials (documents and other information carriers) of the attestation of prosecutors and investigators of the Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine were destroyed after its completion. During the pre-trial investigation, it was established that, according to this act, the materials of the attestation of investigators and prosecutors of the central apparatus of the Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine, conducted during September-December 2019, were destroyed.
And although the answer does not name who exactly signed the act of destruction, it is known from open sources that the heads of the commissions included, in particular, Gyunduz Mamedov, Viktor Chumak, Vitaliy Kasko, and Viktor Trepak. Also, Polina Lysenko, the current deputy director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, who worked at the Prosecutor General's Office/Office of the Prosecutor General at that time, could have probably put her signature.
The OGP also added that other requested information constitutes a secret of the pre-trial investigation and is not currently subject to disclosure. They also clarified that the Procedure for prosecutors to undergo attestation, approved by the order of the Prosecutor General in 2019, does not contain requirements regarding the storage periods of attestation materials. At the same time, the protocols of the personnel commissions and other materials (paper documents) transferred for storage by the personnel commissions based on the results of the attestation are stored in the Department of Personnel Work and Civil Service of the OGP.
According to the Department's nomenclature of cases, documents (protocols, decisions, etc.) of personnel commissions regarding the attestation of prosecutors of the Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine, regional, local, and military prosecutor's offices have a storage period of 75 years in personal files, and 5 years for those not included in personal files.
Recall
In September 2019, the newly appointed Prosecutor General Ruslan Riaboshapka launched a reform of the prosecutor's office, which was supposed to meet European standards. The result of the reform was the renaming of the Prosecutor General's Office to the Office of the Prosecutor General, the deprivation of some functions of the prosecutor's office, including the function of pre-trial supervision, and the dismissal of more than 50% of the staff of the prosecutor's office. The latter caused a wave of lawsuits from those dismissed as a result of the attestation – courts quite often satisfied these lawsuits and agreed on the need to pay compensation. The total amount of compensation reached tens of millions of hryvnias. According to lawyers, such a development was quite predictable, and the attestation procedure itself raised doubts about its legality and impartiality from the very beginning.