The President Demands “Real Anti-Corruption Policy”

President Leonid Kuchma said that he intends to demand implementing “harsh and real” anti-corruption policy in Ukraine, reports Interfax Ukraine. “We are facing an especially intense and difficult year. Perhaps some hope to activate shadow processes in the election year under the cover of confusion and chaos. Let them abandon their hopes: there will be no chaos! To the contrary, I will strictly demand to conduct a real — I stress again, real — anti-corruption policy, no matter who will try to prevent me,” Leonid Kuchma said last Thursday in Kyiv, opening the All-Ukrainian Conference on Fighting Organized Crime and Corruption and Protecting Human Rights. The conference was also attended by Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, Chairman of Verkhovna Rada Volodymyr Lytvyn, heads of ministries and departments, other central and regional authorities, and people’s deputies. The president stated that “in spite of the separate local achievements, in general, the state policy to fight corruption and organized crime has not changed the situation in principle... The scale of corruption is such that it has inflicted all spheres of our life, especially the one of the economic relations, like, say, energy, agro-industrial complex, foreign economic activity, banking system, privatization, the budget sphere, and entrepreneurship. We have to speak also about corruption in the judicial system and law enforcement bodies,” he stressed. President Kuchma stated that among the conference participants’ goals is “persuading the public in the abnormal and pernicious character of corruption... From this standpoint it is similar to drug addiction that can be defeated only if we persuade society that it is a social evil,” the head of the state stressed.