MOSCOW — In a blow to hopes that Ukraine will be able to
overcome a decades-long struggle with corruption and mismanagement, the
country’s Western-trained economy minister resigned Wednesday, saying he had
been unable to beat back corruption.
Economy Minister Aivaras Abromavicius said that he had
come under pressure from senior allies of the country’s president to make
patronage appointments in state-owned companies and to appoint unqualified
deputies who would have overseen the most lucrative industries in Ukraine.
The resignation fed growing concerns from Ukraine’s
allies that the country remains stuck in unscrupulous dealmaking almost two
years after pro-Western protesters overthrew President Viktor Yanukovych, whom
they condemned as corrupt.
“We learned to manage the resistance of the old
system, but it turned out that some of the new people around are even worse
than the old ones,” Abromavicius told reporters in the Ukrainian capital of
Kiev on Wednesday. “Neither I nor my team have any desire to be a cover for
open corruption, or to be a marionette of those who want to establish control
over state money. I do not want to go to Davos and talk about our successes,
while at the same time deals are being concluded behind my back in the interests
of certain people.”
Abromavicius, who was born in Lithuania, was one of a
small team of Western-trained foreigners whom President Petro Poroshenko
invited to join the government after his May 2014 election. The perception at
the time was that Ukraine was so corrupt that the only people who could be
fully trusted to fight it were people who were not Ukrainian.
Abromavicius
naturalized in order to take the post. Another foreign appointee was Mikheil
Saakashvili, the former president of Georgia, who was named a regional governor
and has also clashed with what he says is entrenched corruption among Ukraine’s
new elite.
Kononenko is
the deputy head of the president’s political party and is so close to the
president that he has been nicknamed Poroshenko’s “gray cardinal.” Last year,
the former head of Ukraine’s state security service, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko,
accused Kononenko of money laundering. Kononenko denied those charges.
On Wednesday, Kononenko said that Abromavicius’s
resignation was simply “an attempt to blame lawmakers from our party for a
failure to solve issues that were not solved during the year,” Interfax-Ukraine
reported. “I believe that ministers should be responsible for what they have
done and not shift the responsibility over to the parliament.”
The resignation was met with disappointment from many
of Ukraine’s biggest backers in the West, including the U.S. ambassador to
Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt. He called Abromavicius “one of the Ukrainian
government’s great champions of reform” in a posting on Twitter.
Separately, he
and ambassadors from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and four other
Western countries issued an unusual public statement saying they were “deeply
disappointed” by the resignation.
A spokesman for Poroshenko did not respond to a
request for comment. Abromavicius’s predecessor as economy minister also
resigned, citing frustration with the slow pace of reforms in the country.
The political turmoil comes as the violence in
Ukraine’s east has largely calmed since September. Russian diplomats have said
privately that they now see less need to apply direct pressure on Ukraine’s
leaders as Russia watches the government lose support through problems of its
own making.
Poroshenko has struggled to pass unpopular
constitutional changes that would decentralize power from Kiev and hand more to
Ukraine’s breakaway eastern regions. Those measures are part of peace
agreements signed a year ago that would also require rebels to hand control of
Ukraine’s borders back to Kiev, a step they have not taken. U.S. and European
Union leaders have said they will not roll back sanctions against Russia until
the measures of the peace agreement are fully obeyed.
Abromavicius said that he decided to resign after one
of Poroshenko’s closest allies, businessman and lawmaker Ihor Kononenko, tried
to appoint unqualified deputy heads of the economy ministry who would have
overseen the state-owned natural gas company NAK Neftegaz and Ukraine’s defense
producers.
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