Well-known lawyer Serhii Holovatyi tapped as new minister of justice
by Zenon Zawada
Kyiv Press Bureau
KYIV - Serhii Holovatyi is Ukraine's new justice minister, tapped to replace Roman Zvarych, the American-born politician whose tenure was marred by several scandals.
President Viktor Yushchenko signed an order appointing the 51-year-old lawyer to head the Ministry of Justice. Mr. Holovatyi is one of the founders of Rukh and previously served as Ukraine's justice minister between September 1995 and August 1997 under former President Leonid Kuchma.
Among the biggest expectations of Mr. Holovatyi is that he will renew the Ukrainian people's faith in the authority of the law above all else, Mr. Yushchenko said when introducing the new justice minister on October 10.
"The main characteristic of the last four to five years has been the Ukrainian people's lost faith in the supremacy of the law," Mr. Yushchenko said.
Mr. Yushchenko said he has received 900 letters during his presidency from ordinary Ukrainians - more than half of which are complaints about corrupt or incompetent judges, prosecutors and police.
Mr. Holovatyi will be productive and honestly serve the Ukrainian people as a result of his "experience, coupled with his devotion to national interests," Mr. Yushchenko said.
"I don't want any falsification to take place within these walls," the president told Mr. Holovatyi. "It's very important that the people refer to you as the truth itself."
Most significant about Mr. Holovatyi's selection, according to political experts, is his active role in the Heorhii Gongadze case, as well as his obvious antipathy toward Procurator General Sviatoslav Piskun.
Mr. Holovatyi has served as a lawyer for Lesia Gongadze, the mother of the enterprising journalist murdered five years ago, apparently for his provocative articles.
In the European Court for Human Rights, Mr. Holovatyi also represented Mykola Melnychenko, who complained that his right to run for the Verkhovna Rada was illegally denied him.
"I appointed ... a man whom it is difficult to accuse of bias in this matter and in other matters," Mr. Yushchenko said on October 7, referring to the Gongadze case. "I am sure that Ukraine will make significant advances in this issue, based on his authority and his capabilities."
However, political experts are puzzled about why Mr. Yushchenko would appoint someone who would clearly conflict with Mr. Piskun. Just two days after his appointment, Mr. Holovatyi referred to the procurator general as an illegitimate prosecutor who should be replaced.
"Therefore everything depends on whoever fills this position not turning out to be the next scoundrel in line," Mr. Holovatyi said.
President Yushchenko may be laying the groundwork for Mr. Piskun's firing, said Volodymyr Fesenko, the chairman of the Penta Center for Applied Political Research, which contracts its services to various political parties in Ukraine.
An increasing avalanche of criticism has been heaped upon the procurator general, he said. Internal Affairs Minister Yurii Lutsenko recently accused Mr. Piskun of blocking cases involving election fraud committed by those in former President Leonid Kuchma's circle.
"Piskun became a risk figure and a conflict figure, and there are many negative factors connected with him - especially as regards the Gongadze matter," Mr. Fesenko said. "I think Holovatyi is supposed to play the role of a key counter-factor: from one side create pressure on Piskun, and from the other side initiate the end of this matter."
However, the procurator general's position is much more powerful than that of the justice minister, said Ivan Lozowy, president of the Kyiv-based Institute of Statehood and Democracy, which is exclusively financed by Ukrainian business donations.
Moreover, Mr. Holovatyi may run aground in his conflict with Mr. Piskun because the latter is an "incredibly sly fellow" who's obviously been dragging his feet in investigating Gongadze's murder, Mr. Lozowy added.
However, enough Ukrainians may be dissatisfied with Mr. Piskun to give Mr. Holovatyi ground to stand on.
"I know people in the Procurator (General's Office) who are asking me what the hell is going on," Mr. Lozowy said. "People taking part in the Orange Revolution are telling me corruption is as bad as ever under Piskun. He blocks or closes or delays investigations touching the powerful and the mighty. They're throwing their hands up in the air, saying 'We believed Yushchenko, and now we have Piskun.' "
Mr. Piskun was re-appointed procurator general in December 2004 after he sued the Ukrainian government, arguing that Mr. Kuchma illegally fired him in October 2003.
When Mr. Yushchenko took over the presidency, he kept Mr. Piskun on.
However, Mr. Piskun threatened to revert to the courts again if he were to be fired. "One must not fire a person, even a street cleaner, without legal grounds," he said.
Another concern political experts have is that Mr. Holovatyi has proven that he rarely toes the party line in politics, which can be interpreted in both a positive and a negative light.
Mr. Kuchma fired Mr. Holovatyi from the Justice Ministry shortly after he introduced the "Clean Hands" program to fight corruption, Mr. Lozowy said.
"My worry is that Serhii doesn't burn himself out in a futile battle against Piskun rather than doing some good, such as announcing a 'Clean Hands' campaign, which Yushchenko would probably welcome," Mr. Lozowy said.
Unlike many Ukrainian politicians, Mr. Holovatyi's past is virtually spotless, experts said, giving him the moral authority to battle corruption.
Mr. Holovatyi once again demonstrated his individualist bent when he voted to support Mr. Yushchenko's choice for prime minister, Yurii Yekhanurov. He was a member of the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc at the time and, for his betrayal, party leaders promptly booted him.
However, in voting for Mr. Yekhanurov, Mr. Holovatyi was able to demonstrate his loyalty to President Yushchenko, experts said.
Mr. Holovatyi was born in Odesa on May 29, 1954, according to the biography submitted to Who's Who in Ukraine. He defended his dissertation and earned his law degree from Shevchenko University in Kyiv in 1980.
As a founding member of the National Rukh of Ukraine, Mr. Holovatyi was at the forefront of Ukraine's drive for independence from the Soviet Union.
"He's a fighter," Mr. Lozowy said. "When he was head of the Kyiv organization of Rukh in August 1991, his proposal at the time was to build barricades in order to defend Ukraine's fragile independence."
Mr. Holovatyi has served as a national deputy in all four sessions of the Verkhovna Rada since independence.
He has "undergone an excellent path as a lawyer both in Ukraine and abroad," President Yushchenko noted.
Mr. Holovatyi has served on Rada committees involving international relations and law. When he was appointed justice minister, he was away in Strasbourg, France, attending the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), where he chaired its rights committee.
Mr. Yushchenko's decision to let go of Mr. Zvarych, who caused the administration's first scandal, came as little surprise to observers. However, Mr. Zvarych told the Inter TV network on October 13 that the president had not explained to him the reason for his dismissal.
Controversy had erupted in mid-February, when Mr. Zvarych threatened to resign as justice minister after the entire Cabinet of Ministers voted to support a bill that would ban Ukrainians from engaging in oil re-exportation. Oil re-exportation involves buying oil from foreign countries, namely Russia, and reselling it to other foreign countries.
Ministers wanted to ban the practice in order to prevent oil trading from destabilizing Ukraine's domestic market and prices, as well as to guarantee adequate supplies for Ukrainian agricultural enterprises. Ukraine has frequently confronted a deficit of oil and petroleum products for agricultural use.
Mr. Zvarych was against the proposal, and the reason became obvious. His wife, Svitlana, is an assistant manager for Oil Transit, a firm that buys oil from Russia and resells it to other countries.
In their defense, Mrs. Zvarych told the Internet news site Trybuna that her husband made the threat because she was forced to sell her oil to Ihor Yeremieyev, a major shareholder in the Halychyna oil refinery.
Mr. Yeremieyev, however, was involved in illegal financial schemes that threatened to drag in both her and her husband, as well as besmirch the new Yushchenko government, she alleged.
Eventually, President Yushchenko agreed to allow oil re-exportation, defending his decision by stating that if the government were to ban one commodity from re-exportation, then it could potentially ban many others.
That defense is weak, Mr. Lozowy said, because the Ukrainian government routinely bans re-exportation of other commodities, such as hard currency, sugar and milling wheat.
In Mr. Lozowy's view, the decision was a personal favor to Mr. Zvarych and the first indication that it was going to be business as usual in the Ukrainian government, despite the promises made on the maidan (Independence Square).
"Yushchenko made a personal decision in favor of a person who was close to him at the time," Mr. Lozowy said. "Roman [Zvarych] traveled with Yushchenko to Austria to the clinic. He was pretty close to Yushchenko during the campaign. Yushchenko, without getting into details, made the decision on a personal level."
The straw that broke the camel's back for Mr. Yushchenko was Mr. Zvarych's role in assisting Yulia Tymoshenko in her alleged misdealings surrounding the Nikopol Ferroalloy Plant, political experts said.
Ruslan Boichenko accused Mr. Zvarych of calling him and demanding that he execute orders to install the court-appointed managers who represented the Pryvat Group, Mr. Lozowy said.
When firing his Cabinet on September 8, Mr. Yushchenko accused Ms. Tymoshenko of trying to swing control of the Nikopol Ferroalloy Plant to the Pryvat Group, which includes Dnipropetrovsk billionaire Ihor Kolomoyskyi.
In exchange, Ms. Tymoshenko was seeking influence in the 1 + 1 TV network, Mr. Yushchenko alleged.
When he refused to carry out Mr. Zvarych's orders, Mr. Boichenko alleged that the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Judicial Administration sent for him and forced him to sign a resignation letter.
"They apparently weren't doing what they should have been doing, which is the last phase of putting in directors from Pryvat," Mr. Lozowy said.
Mr. Zvarych's actions might have been illegal, considering that Ukraine's Constitution requires government officials to act only within the limits of their authority, Mr. Lozowy said.
"If the justice minister is not authorized to discuss with or pressure a court executor, that's illegal," Mr. Lozowy said. "If he's exceeded his authority, then that's a crime - not that it isn't done every day."
At a September 12 press conference responding to the allegations, Mr. Zvarych said he did nothing illegal.
However, Mr. Zvarych's most notorious scandal proved to be his embellishment of his resume.
For eight years, Mr. Zvarych had claimed that he earned a master's degree in philosophy from Columbia University.
Although Mr. Zvarych said he had completed at least eight graduate-level courses at Columbia University, he finally acknowledged that he was never awarded a master's degree.
His résumé also contained other embellishments and lies, including a claim that he was a New York University professor when, according to an NYU spokesman, he was a part-time lecturer.
Mr. Zvarych also claimed to have been an assistant professor at Columbia University, a tenure-track position, when in fact he was an unpaid teaching assistant.
"For nine months that's a lot of scandals for one minister," Mr. Lozowy said. "It's his lack of judgment. First picking a public fight with Tymoshenko and putting a stop to a decision supported by everyone in the Cabinet, then switching sides and trying to appease her by putting pressure on judges in trying to take over Nikopol."
Political experts agree that Mr. Zvarych's future in Ukrainian politics, if he has any future, will be a steep uphill climb.
"He, as well as [Yevhen] Chervonenko [former minister of transport and communications] and [Petro] Poroshenko [former secretary of the National Security and Defense Council] must go through the period of political rehabilitation," Mr. Fesenko said. "They should renew a positive political image and set new political positions, most likely in Our Ukraine."
In the meantime, Mr. Zvarych has already rolled up his sleeves in the legal field, announcing on October 11 that he will defend a wealthy Ukrainian oligarch in court.
His client? None other than Mr. Poroshenko. Builders are accusing him of trying to bribe them in order to take control of a multi-story apartment building.
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, October 16, 2005, No. 42, Vol. LXXIII
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