Business demands reform of how law enforcement agencies work

Business representatives came out with this demand at the congress “Public finance system reform – the path to Ukraine's recovery,” organized with the support of CIPE.

“It is critically important for us to reduce the pressure on business. All of us need to get involved in changes to legislation. We are talking about two things we are working on with the business community. The first is the standards of prosecutors' activity. We, as SUP, proposed this idea back in 2020. Standards of prosecutors' activity were developed, approved and were advisory in nature. Experience has shown that an advisory nature does not work for us, and these standards must be mandatory,” said Kateryna Hlazkova, executive director of the Union of Ukrainian Entrepreneurs, reports FinClub.

The possibility of incorporating these standards into the Criminal Procedure Code was discussed. “That did not work out either. At the latest meeting at the Prosecutor General's Office, it was said that the standards had been re-read and verified, certain additions had been made to them, and now they must be approved as mandatory for all law enforcement agencies. We were promised that this should be signed by the Prosecutor General in the near future,” Kateryna Hlazkova said.

The second important area is amending the Criminal Procedure Code. “To a greater extent, the changes concern procedural matters that make it impossible to bring a business to a halt. Because a search is a last resort and must be justified. The seizure of property and the procedure for returning it to entrepreneurs must be spelled out. The amount of bail exceeds the amount of losses potentially caused by this crime, which has not yet been proven, by several times or by orders of magnitude. So it is proposed that bail should not exceed the amount of losses recorded as caused by the actions,” the expert emphasized.

Systemic changes are needed. “We need to restore the presumption of innocence for business. Because in this country there is a presumption of innocence for the authorities and always a presumption of guilt for business. That little particle ‘not’ is very important,” Kateryna Hlazkova said.

Parliament acknowledged that these problems exist. “Since the beginning of 2023, interaction between business and law enforcement has not always brought satisfaction to business. There are systemic problems that need to be settled at the legislative level. We have drafted bill No. 9211 with amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code. And it concerns not only the Economic Security Bureau (BEB), but all law enforcement agencies,” said Halyna Yanchenko, chair of the parliamentary temporary investigative commission on investor protection.

Yaroslav Zhelezniak, first deputy chair of the Verkhovna Rada committee on finance, taxation and customs policy, urges not to call attempts to turn the Economic Security Bureau into a normal state body a reform. “This is not a reform. We simply want them to stop doing ‘nonsense’: to drive out Tatarov's people, who are placed throughout the entire chain of command, and to hire normal ones. Is that a reform? No!” he assured.

Lawmakers created a special commission on the protection of investors' rights three and a half years ago. “We have two areas of activity. The first is the consideration of complaints from business. This is mostly the analysis of high-profile cases. And the second area is that, on the basis of the complaints from business that we have considered, we try to understand why such a problem arose. Who is to blame for it and what needs to be changed at the legislative level, and in some cases at the level of personnel policy,” Halyna Yanchenko reported.

During its work, the commission brought more than 20 high-profile disputes worth UAH 25 billion to a logical conclusion. “Based on this experience, we proposed legislative changes,” she said. At the start, the commission countered raiding, which prompted the ARMA reform, and raiding on ARMA's part disappeared.