A split in BPP?

The presidential faction in the parliament is divided. At the sitting of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc (BPP) on Monday night, a part of the MPs accused their colleagues of corruption and information assaults. Viktor Chumak, for instance, said that a denigrating campaign against him was launched by the deputy chair of the faction, Ihor Kononenko, Serhii Berezenko, notorious after this year’s election in Chernihiv, and Serhii Pashynsky, deputy chair of the People’s Front faction.

“It is very hard to wage a black PR campaign against me: I am not an oligarch, and have never been involved in oligarchic business,” said Chumak in his comment in the parliament. “I have a house of 170 square meters, but the media wrote it costs one million dollars. The thing is that I run for the National Anti-Corruption Agency, so this dirty campaign was meant not to drag me through the mud publicly, but pressurize the commission, so that its members should not vote for me.”

Chumak also commented on the conflict that flared up at the faction’s sitting on Monday: “We cannot see the faction’s standpoint on what is going around Kasko [deputy prosecutor general. – Author] and Trepak [head of the Main Directorate on Countering Corruption and Organized Crime at the Central Directorate of the SBU. – Author]. We visit live shows and have to invent non-extant things. We want to see the factions position. Either it covers the corruptionists’ backs, or it purges them. That is why a group of members came up with an initiative: either we help the president to cleanse the country of corruption, or we stand in his way. We decided to help. So, now our main goal is not to cover the facts of corruption (including those involving the faction’s members), but disclose them. Otherwise, we create a total cover-up. If it cannot be solved at the sittings of the faction, we have to bring it out into public space.”

MP Svitlana Zalishchuk also commented on the conflict within the BPP: “I am not sure that corrupt MPs will leave the faction. That is why those people who can fight this corruption, who have not dissolved in the comfy parliamentary environment, and are not afraid of the job, need to join efforts. We have agreed to act united. I think we must keep publicly defending our standpoint, and if we learn about facts of abuse of power, or if we have suspicions of corrupt deals going on, we must use our authority as MPs to publicly disclose them all, and demand that the law-enforcement authorities investigate them further.”