The European Commission praised Ukraine’s attorney general, Viktor Shokin, for his efforts to fight corruption in a December 2015 progress report released nine days after then-Vice President Joe Biden called for his removal.
The report runs counter to Biden’s claims that the European Union joined his demands that Shokin be removed for being corrupt and obstructing anti-corruption reforms.
In fact, the December 18, 2015 progress report, obtained by the New York Post, says the European Union was pleased that Ukraine had made “remarkable” progress, including in “preventing and fighting corruption,” and therefore he was eligible to travel without a visa in Europe.
The European Commission noted that Shokin had just appointed the head of a specialized anti-corruption prosecutor’s office, which he described as “an indispensable component of an effective and independent institutional framework to combat high-level corruption.”
The new office would help the newly created National Anti-Corruption Bureau fight corruption, the report said, and urged Ukrainian leaders to ensure both bodies are “fully operational” by the first quarter of 2016.
But Shokin left on March 29, 2016, forced to resign by Biden’s threats to then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that he would withhold $1 billion in US aid unless the attorney general was fired.
An FBI informant file said Mykola Zlochevsky, owner of natural gas company Burisma Holdings, claimed he was “forced” to pay $5 million each in bribes to Joe and Hunter Biden in exchange for Shokin’s removal. AP
“Based on these commitments, the anti-corruption benchmark is considered to have been reached,” the European Commission report concluded. “The advances indicated in the fifth report on anti-corruption policies, in particular the legislative and institutional advances, have continued.”
At the same time, the EU Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship issued a public statement on December 18, 2015, praising Shokin and other officials for making “enormous progress” on reform, according to a report by John Solomon of Just the News.
“I congratulate the Ukrainian leadership on the progress made to complete the reform process which will bring important benefits to the citizens of Ukraine in the future,” said then EU Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos. “The hard work to achieve this important goal has paid off. Now it is important to continue maintaining all standards.”
Biden bragged in 2018 about his lobbying campaign to force the Ukrainian government to fire Shokin, who had been in office for just 13 months, after being appointed broomstick a year after the Maidan revolution toppled the former corrupt government aligned with Russia. .
“I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If they don’t fire the prosecutor, they won’t get the money,’” Biden said, referring to a $1 billion US loan guarantee, during an event at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018. “Well, son of a bitch. He was fired.”
At the time he was ousted, Shokin was investigating the corrupt energy company Burisma that paid Biden’s son Hunter $1 million a year to sit on its board of directors.
Shokin’s office issued an order to confiscate all property of Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky in kyiv on February 2, 2016.
Hunter’s former business partner, Devon Archer, testified last month before the House Oversight Committee that Burisma added Hunter to its board of directors so “people would feel intimidated into messing with them…legally.” .
Shokin was “a threat” to Burisma, Archer told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
“He ended up seizing assets from [Zlochevsky] – a house, some cars, a couple of properties. AND [Zlochevsky] I never actually went back to Ukraine after Shokin seized all his assets.”
In an interview with The Post last month from his home in kyiv, Shokin denied being corrupt and said he was illegally fired.
He accuses Biden of “interfering in the internal affairs of Ukraine” by forcing his ouster and described the then-vice president’s threat to withhold U.S. aid as “blackmail.”
Shokin notes that, seven years after his ouster, neither Biden nor anyone else has presented evidence of corruption or wrongdoing on his part.
The European Commission’s praise for Ukraine’s progress on anti-corruption reform during Shokin’s tenure echoes internal State Department documents published by Just the News.
A working group of experts from the State, Treasury and Justice Departments had recommended in October 2015 that Ukraine should receive $1 billion in US loan guarantees when Biden traveled to Kiev in December 2015, because the country had successfully adequate progress in the fight against corruption, Solomon reported last month. .
The State Department memos included a personal letter from senior U.S. official Victoria Nuland to Shokin telling him that Secretary of State John Kerry was “impressed” with Shokin’s progress.
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But Biden, Nuland and others later claimed that the then vice president was simply carrying out official US policy and that European officials agreed that Shokin was corrupt and should be removed.
“It was a policy that was closely coordinated with the Europeans, with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. But not only did we not see progress, but we saw the [Prosecutor General’s Office] set back this period,” Nuland, now Biden’s deputy secretary of state, told the Senate Homeland Security and Accountability Committee in 2020.
Anders Aslund, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, told the Wall Street Journal in 2019: “Everyone in the Western community wanted Shokin fired… The entire G-7, the IMF, the EBRD. [the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development]everyone was united that Shokin had to go, and the spokesperson for this was Joe Biden.”
However, none of the European bodies cited ever specifically called for Shokin’s removal or even mentioned his name.
Instead, two months after Biden’s lobbying campaign began, bodies including the IMF issued statements generically criticizing Ukraine’s “slow progress” in fighting corruption.
Meanwhile, Solomon reports that another influential international body was praising Ukraine’s anti-corruption reforms during Shokin’s tenure.
In an August 19, 2015 report, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace singled out Shokin’s office as one of the most active on reform.
“Ukraine has adopted a package of anti-corruption laws and established a set of institutions to fight corruption,” said Carnegie’s Ukraine Reform Monitor report. “The Attorney General’s Office has been the most active agency in this agenda.”
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Source: vtt.edu.vn