Six Lessons from the Mudra Case

On August 26, part of the bail was posted for Iryna Mudra, the former Deputy Head of the Office of the President, in the Forrest Gump case; for Viktor Dubovyk, Director General of the Directorate for Legal Policy at the Office of the President, the full amount was paid. 

NZL invited Transparency International Ukraine to reflect on six lessons that can be drawn from the case, whose central figures include former Deputy Head of the Office of the President Iryna Mudra and former MP Maksym Mykytas.

Some of these conclusions already answer painful questions. Others still need time, conversation, and public reckoning.

1. NABU and SAPO are among the most independent law enforcement bodies there are — impervious to pressure even from the highest offices of the state. Even when it comes to the Office of the President.

On the tapes, Mudra and Mykytas say plainly that walking into the anti-corruption agencies with the kind of offers or pressure that pass for “business as usual” in Ukrainian politics is a waste of effort. The people caught in these conversations openly acknowledge the autonomy of the NABU and the SAPO, all but stating outright that Bankova Street — the seat of the President’s Office — is no longer an umbrella that can guarantee immunity or quietly bury a case. This is the best proof that, over years of reform, the NABU and the SAPO have managed to build a durable immunity to instructions from outside.

For society and for international partners, this is an important marker of the anti-corruption institutions’ genuine independence. When an investigation reaches officials of the rank of a deputy head of the Office of the President, it shows that there are no “untouchables,” whatever their post or their proximity to the rooms where decisions are made. In this instance, institutional independence outran private political arrangements. And it likewise showed that last year’s protests in defense of NABU’s and SAPO’s independence were not in vain.

2. Today’s senior officials do not shrink from taking part in schemes alongside people already suspected or accused of corruption.

Take Mykytas: the Forrest Gump case brings his fifth notice of suspicion. Despite a toxic background, a trail of criminal proceedings, and life spent permanently in law enforcement’s sights, such figures remain sought-after partners for those currently in power — because they know how to “sort things out” and have no shortage of the right contacts. This points to a deep deformation of power, one in which well-worn schemes and ready-made connections are prized above any reputational risk.

Bringing such people in underscores how narrow the circle is of those willing to run dubious operations at the very top. Senior officials, in all likelihood, knowingly join forces with those whose reputations are already compromised, in the hope that status and the levers of influence they hold can offset their partners’ toxicity. Yet each new notice of suspicion only multiplies the systemic failures of that cooperation.

3. Many of the powerful, for all their assurances to international partners, still want to establish controlling influence over the anti-corruption bodies.

Public declarations of devotion to reform and to meeting the demands of European integration regularly shatter against behind-the-scenes attempts to bring key institutions to heel. For many in government, the independence of NABU and SAPO remains a convenient slogan meant for external consumption only, while inside the system the search for “loopholes” and levers of influence never stops. The urge to control how leadership is appointed, how investigations unfold, or how audits are conducted has gone nowhere — nor have designs on assembling one’s own “personnel reserve” for these institutions.

This double standard poses a constant threat to the country’s entire anti-corruption architecture. Attempts to install loyal people, or to curb the procedural independence of prosecutors and detectives, expose the heart of the matter: those in power still treat a controllable law enforcement as an element of their own security. That is precisely why safeguarding these bodies’ independence remains a daily challenge, not a task already accomplished.

4. A senior official’s sound decisions and good deeds do not earn them an indulgence.

For all Iryna Mudra’s work in setting up the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, her part in the scheme to raise bail for Halushchenko and in the corporate raiding of state enterprises will not be forgotten. For a long time, Mudra was regarded as a key driver of the international reparations mechanisms, yet the suspicion has dealt a serious blow to her reputation. Political reality makes the point: no past merits, no lofty affairs of state, can serve as a “shield” or an advance credit to justify unlawful acts.

The wartime and diplomatic context only raise the bar society sets for officials’ ethics. She will enter Ukrainian history and the public record not through her appearances on international stages, but through her banal participation in shadow schemes to launder funds and unlawfully redistribute assets. It is a sobering lesson for everyone in the corridors of power: public achievements do not paper over hidden, allegedly corrupt acts, and society will not hand out indulgences for past accomplishments.

5. We do not know how deep corruption runs or how far it has spread, but it is becoming ever harder to conceal. And the conditions are now in place for those guilty in such schemes to be punished.

Since last November, after the first notices of suspicion in the Midas case, we have seen a further string of high-profile investigations, and their range — like the range of people drawn into them — keeps widening. But we can already see the momentum of these cases, and the very fact that this work is being done speaks less to how widespread corruption is than to the strong likelihood that it will be exposed, and that those named will stand trial. 

The steady stream of new notices of suspicion lays bare the real depth of the problem, but at the same time it establishes a fundamentally new level of transparency. The systematic work of the anti-corruption institutions is gradually changing the risk arithmetic for would-be corrupt actors: the cost of exposure is coming to outweigh any potential shadow profit. When law enforcement works without regard for high office, the sheer inevitability of disclosure ought to become the most powerful tool for preventing likely new crimes. And it is already working: as we recall, officials at the Ministry of Justice never did agree to cooperate with the organized criminal group led by Mykytas and Mudra.

6. Nationalizing a Russian asset does not mean it will work well for Ukraine.

This is a lesson not yet learned and not yet fully worked through, but the warning flags are already up. For it was precisely after the Russian Alfa-Bank was nationalized and turned into the state-owned Sense Bank that the conditions emerged for interested parties to install the people they needed on its board and to push the operations they wanted through the bank. Nationalizing enemy property under patriotic slogans effectively opened the way to creating a new shadow resource under the roof of state institutions. Swapping the nominal owner from a Russian oligarch to the Ukrainian state did not change the substance: the bank came under threat of turning into a captive instrument for scheming.

This episode throws light on one of the gravest systemic dangers in the process of stripping Russian property out of the Ukrainian economy: without independent management, seized assets become a tempting morsel for operators on the inside. Handing property into state ownership without transparent public oversight and independent management only breeds the temptation to use these resources to legalize dirty money or serve private interests. Confiscating an asset from the enemy is only a quarter of the job; the main thing is to keep it from being plundered or commandeered once it is inside the country.

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The investigations into the Forrest Gump and Themis cases are still underway, and no one has repealed the presumption of innocence. Yet the material made public on the tapes and during the hearings on preventive measures for those named in the case compels us to weigh these lessons already — and to consider how to put this new knowledge to practical use going forward.