Yesterday at 20:06
Photo from President of Ukraine press-release
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky promised to make structural changes in an effort to prevent corrupt individuals in government agencies from taking advantage of businesses.
Zelensky said that he supports the “demilitarization” of the tax service and the creation of a State Financial Investigation Service with an emphasis on analysis.
He announced the plans today in a meeting with business leaders.
“Let’s start with the de-commercialization of the Security Service of Ukraine. Now Ivan Bakanov (First Deputy Chairman of the Security Service of Ukraine) is working on this. As soon as a new Parliament is formed, I think in the near future, we will propose to immediately deprive the Security Service of its inappropriate functions. It should deal with spies and saboteurs, and not with interfering in business,” he said.
Currently, and since 2012, the tax service and the border service have worked together as a single structure. Zelensky wants to separate them, to remove the enforcement function from the tax service, a measure intended to reduce conflicts of interest.
As of now, it’s not uncommon for the Security Service to carry out raids on Ukrainian companies, Deutsche Welle reported.
There were about 50 cases of illegal searches at IT companies in 2017, the head of the supervisory board of the Ukrainian Association of Venture and Private Equity UVCA Andriy Kolodyuk said
At the same time, there is no report from the Security Service on the number of cases brought to court, and in what number of cases it’s been possible to prove offenses were made by the businesses.
Expert Hlib Vyshlyinsky said that pressure from law enforcement officers on businesses is one the biggest obstacles to increasing foreign investment in Ukraine.
According to Kolodyuk, damage from searches can reach into the millions of dollars.
