Competition for the post of ARMA head blocked: changes to the law are required to appoint a new head (document)
This was stated by Viktor Dubovyk, citing a letter from the selection committee. According to him, without the necessary amendments to the relevant legislation, the institution will be unable to appoint a new head.
Viktor Dubovyk, a candidate for the post of ARMA head, published a letter signed by Kateryna Ryzhenko on his Facebook page, from which it appears that the commission currently does not know how to decide on the winner given the equal distribution of votes.
“In effect, the Chair of the selection committee has officially confirmed the existence of a legislative conflict that makes it impossible to reach a decision based on the competition results. Moreover, this issue was not identified or resolved during the organisation of the competition procedures, which calls into question compliance with the principle of legal certainty and the predictability of the procedure for all candidates. Moreover, given this legislative framework, it is effectively impossible either to conclude the competition or to lawfully launch a new one,” writes Viktor Dubovyk, referring to the selection committee’s response, which states that it cannot lawfully either recommend appointing a winner or reject their candidacy.
In addition, the lawyer pointed out that there are several issues that raise questions regarding the objectivity and impartiality of the entire competition procedure. In particular, this concerns the lack of translations of his explanations and documents for the members of the competition commission.
“It follows from the response that there was, in fact, no translation of the documents. This is of particular concern given that one of the commission members, who did not support my candidacy, publicly cited the inadequacy of the submitted materials, whilst not speaking Ukrainian, the language in which such documents were submitted. Under these circumstances, a perfectly logical question arises: how could the committee members fully assess the candidates’ documents without ensuring they were properly translated? Equally puzzling is the position that the selection committee is not the custodian of information regarding documents submitted directly to it by candidates as part of the selection procedure,” notes Viktor Dubovyk.
He also emphasises that the names of the experts engaged by the commission to review the competition tasks are not being disclosed, and no checks were carried out at all to identify potential conflicts of interest with the candidates.
At the same time, in her letter, the chair of the commission initially noted that it is not possible to make any decision regarding the competition within the legal framework, and then wrote that the commission had informed the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine of the result of the competitive selection. In other words, it is unclear exactly which result was communicated to the CMU.
According to Viktor Dubovyk, the only possible way out of the situation is to set up a working group and draft amendments to the legislation that will resolve all conflicts and enable a new competition to be held in order to determine the winner in a lawful manner.
“I propose that a working group be established in an open and democratic manner, based within a relevant government body or parliamentary committee, to draft the necessary legislative amendments so that a new competition for the post of ARMA Chair can be launched in a lawful manner, as any other decision will inevitably raise doubts about its legitimacy, and we will end up with a second competition for the post of ARMA Chair conducted in breach of the law (I would remind you that in the previous competition, the candidate became Chair following a tie with another candidate)”, concludes Viktor Dubovyk.
It should be recalled that during the competition for the post of ARMA head, Viktor Dubovyk was the only candidate to pass the cognitive ability test. He subsequently successfully completed the remaining stages of the selection process. However, he did not receive the support of international experts: Kateryna Ryzhenko, Deputy Executive Director of Transparency International Ukraine, and Rita Simoes, an expert on asset recovery at the Basel Institute on Governance, spoke out against his candidacy. The candidate himself stated at the time that he would defend his rights and sent additional materials and queries regarding specific procedural aspects of the competition to the commission.
