“Hyperbolized kleptomania”?
In February parliament discussed two bills that provide for exempting major segments of the public purchases sector from competitive bidding
It will be possible very soon to divide 250 billion state-owned hryvnias without “unnecessary ado.” Under a new law and the new morals of competitive bidding, it will not be compulsory to announce and publish the results of a competition.
“Grab the suitcase: the train is leaving” seems to be the logic of today’s parliamentary majority. The government’s proposals on changing the bidding law, which were submitted to the Verkhovna Rada and voted on in the first reading, are astonishingly cynical. At a time when the media report almost every day on brazen “robberies” of the public treasury by way of criminal bidding procedures, the leadership proposes that these be hidden from human eyes. The impression is the coming elections do inspire no fear of political responsibility. A big jackpot is at stake. The price of the question is Ukraine’s UAH 250-billion-worth state budget. Many have long been dreaming of exempting this handsome amount from a bidding procedure.
Official have made six attempts in the past 18 months to amend the competitive bidding law by making it opaque to the public, for the law on public procurements, passed in April 2010, put them in dire straits. Hundreds of Ukrainians took to reading the updated Public Procurement Bulletin which reported every now and then on the government’s corrupt schemes, such as listing an off-road vehicle as a garbage truck, buying gasoline at a twice as high price, etc. Bids were being canceled by the dozen. As publicity “complicated” life too much, something had to be done.
The first success came in June 2011: thousands of bids were disguised as a “purchase from one bidder.” However, fewer than six months later, practice showed that far from all “gaps” had been filled. So in December the Cabinet moved a new draft law (No. 96334), and on February 9 parliament approved it in the first reading by means of the “classical” 246 votes. The law’s main idea is to withdraw all (!) businesses, including state-run enterprises, public utility facilities, and other companies, with a more than a 50-percent government stake from the jurisdiction of the law on public procurements. As the MP Lesia Orobets explained to The Day, the real aim of the legislative changes is to cancel civic control over the way the government is “dispersing” the UAH 250-billion-worth public procurements. But it turned out that even this law failed to stop all the gaps.
Later last week Verkhovna Rada Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn proposed that Bill No. 10006 “On the Particularities of Making Purchases in Certain Spheres of Economic Activity” be put on the agenda. As MP Viktor Matchuk told The Day, this document essentially boils down to exempting large segments of the procurement sector from bidding procedures. “It is no longer about those who purchase goods or services at the state’s expense, i.e., state-run businesses,” the MP says. “A whole sector is being taken out.” We can clearly see a trend to curtail publicity in spending budgetary funds. “It is not the money of the finance minister or the cabinet. It is the money of the people. And the idea is to rob us of the possibility to watch the way and the purpose this money is being utilized for. What is being removed is the element of competitiveness,” Matchuk says.
“For me, this draft law is one on the lost conscience and hyperbolized kleptomania,” the MP emphasizes to The Day. How can you otherwise explain the fact that, while hundreds of rural first-aid stations are being closed due to lack of funds, the state is showering billions on God knows what at an overrated price at that? “Only in this country do bureaucrats buy dozens of tons of sugar for 14 hryvnias a kilogram or hundreds of tons of gasoline for 15 hryvnias a liter! Yet the government is closing rural schools and hospitals which could be maintained for a mere 2-3 million hryvnias more. In other words, if the bureaucrats stopped stealing for at least a month in these cases, we could save at least 10 rural schools and 10 district hospitals,” Orobets says.
In her words, the attempt to make urgent changes to the bidding legislation not only shows the haste and the uninhibited desire of bureaucrats to steal as much as they can while the current regime remains in power. This also shows the increasing fear of the grassroots who are more and more interested to know which of the holes is sucking in their money, Orobets says.
Both Matchuk and Orobets promised to vote against what they call criminal bills that provide for changes in the competitive bidding law. They say some of their colleagues will also be doing so. But they are doubtful of success. “If the draft law is here, this means somebody needs it,” Matchuk says, “and this ‘somebody’ will do their best to ‘railroad’ it in the second reading, as they did in the first one.” The MP says that the parliament majority members or, rather, their voting cards will pass the law in the second reading. Even the election factor will not work here, the MP thinks. Even if the changes are adopted, voters will not punish the MPs because the former are simply not keeping track of this. In the MP’s view, only public unrest can thwart voting for curtailed publicity in the bidding legislation. However, it is a very unlikely scenario. “People will in fact feel nothing, so they will not react,” Matchuk told The Day. “They would feel this if they had a hryvnia stolen from their pocket. But if it is a million from the state budget, this seems to be of nobody’s concern.” In the MP’s opinion, the immaturity of Ukrainian society makes it possible to pass this kind of laws and then plunder the state treasury.
