Ukraine’s NGOs are up in arms over a new law No. 12414 passed on July 22, which they say will destroy Ukraine's anticorruption reforms.

The law will massively expand the General Prosecutor’s powers, Ukraine’s top policeman, allowing him to arbitrarily change the jurisdiction of any case and effectively disenfranchise any of the other enforcement bodies of power.

It also denudes the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), which are two of the three legs of the anti-corruption triumvirate that also includes the Anti-corruption court (ACC) that were set up at the insistence of the IMF a decade ago to try and control Ukraine’s runaway corruption. As bne IntelliNews reported at the time, corruption in Ukraine is not a problem, corruption is the system.

“Corruption-related cases that involve senior officials of the Prosecutor General’s Office are in our investigative jurisdiction, and we will keep investigating these cases. Whatever incidents may arise, they can’t affect our position,” Artem Sytnyk, head of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), told bne IntelliNews in an exclusive interview in his Kyiv office just after the body was established in 2016.

The Nobel Laureate Center for Civil Liberties (NLCCL) issued a statement that called on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to veto Draft Law.

“The Center for Civil Liberties calls on the President of Ukraine to veto draft law No. 12414, which was adopted by Parliament today, July 22, in violation of parliamentary procedure. The draft law poses a direct threat to the rule of law and human rights,” the statement said.

The NLCCL also called on the EU to pressure Bankova (Ukraine’s equivalent of the Kremlin) to squash the bill before it is signed into effect.

“This draft law eliminates the procedural independence of prosecutors. In fact, the Prosecutor General is now granted the power to change the jurisdiction of any case in Ukraine, depriving all other law enforcement bodies of their independence,” the NLCCL said in the statement. “They can decide whether or not to investigate a case, transfer an investigation to another body, assign a case to other investigators, require that all charges against top officials be signed exclusively by them, and also direct the course of investigations and issue binding instructions to any investigators.”

The NLCCL implied that the new bill is the latest in a string of actions by Zelenskiy to concentrate more power in his hands as he is accused of becoming increasingly authoritarian in his ruling style.

According to Ukrainian legislation, the Prosecutor General has no guarantees of independence and is entirely politically dependent on the President’s Office.

Andriy Kostin is the current Prosecutor General of Ukraine and has served in the position since July 2022. Kostin is a lawyer and and previously a member of the Ukrainian parliament as deputy for Zelenskiy’s Servant of the People party as head of its legal policy committee. He is considered a close ally of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

The law comes in the wake of a government reshuffle that saw Zelenskiy consolidate his hold on power by replacing Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal with Yuliia Svyrydenko, a competent politician who successfully negotiated the difficult minerals deal signed on April 30 with the Trump administration. However, she is reportedly very close to Zelenskiy’s right hand man, head of the presidential office, Andriy Yermak, and an ultra-loyalist to Zelenskiy personally. Shmyhal was seen as a largely technocratic prime minister and has been retained and demoted to Defence Minister.

Zelenskiy campaigned on an anticorruption platform and has a good record on fighting against corruption following his oligarch speech in March 2021 and then his oligarch law in September of the same year. He also ordered the arrest of oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky in September 2023, his former business partner and mentor.

However, as Bankova comes under increasing pressure as the US withdraws its support and the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) continues to make steady advances on the battlefield, it seems that Zelenskiy is shoring up his position by gathering more threads of power to his hand.

The General Prosecutor’s office has always been of special importance. The previous head was Iryna Venediktova, another Zelenskiy loyalist, and one of his first appointments.

She served from March 2020 to July 2022, becoming the first woman to hold the position in Ukraine's history. Venediktova was also affiliated with the Servant of the People party and previously headed the State Bureau of Investigations (SBI). She was dismissed by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy amid concerns over insufficient progress in prosecuting wartime treason and collaboration cases following the Russian invasion in 2022, but was also criticized for taking an excessively pro-president partisan line in the execution of her duties.

Corruption remains a big problem in Ukraine and several high profile arrests were made only this week of officials from the law enforcement bodies.

Ukraine's EU accession bid is underway and while Kyiv has scored well in the nuts and bolts Internal Markets cluster screening process, EU diplomats report there are much bigger problems with the Fundamental cluster that deals with issues like anti-corruption bodies and the independence of the judiciary.

The EU’s reaction to the new controversial law was muted. European Commission spokesperson Guillaume Mercier said that the European Union is not going to raise the issue of suspending financial assistance to Ukraine over actions against NABU or SAPO, reports European Pravda.

Mercier said that while no action was planned at the moment, he noted that the EU is concerned about the situation with NABU and SAPO.

NABU has been particularly active in busting large scale and high-profile corruption cases, but it has failed to deliver on jailing top officials thanks to Ukraine’s ingrained corruption.

NABU’s biggest test came when it arrested Roman Nasirov, the government’s financial controller and former President Petro Poroshenko's right-hand man, and charged him with embezzling millions of dollars in March 2017. However, following an uncomfortable weekend in jail, Nasirov’s wife managed to come up with over a million dollars in cash and bailed him out before Monday, avoiding an arraignment by a judge. The case was quietly buried and Nasirov never stood trial. Indeed, he stood for the presidential election in 2019 and ran against Zelenskiy.

As reported by bne IntelliNews, since then Bankova has quietly been increasing its control over NABU, effectively defanging it as an anticorruption agency. Amongst other moves, the NABU’s first director, dubbed the “Eliot Ness of Ukraine” was replaced by his deputy, Semen Kryvonos who was seen as closer to Zelenskiy.