The BES Director Selection Committee will not review the candidacy of the competition winner

The selection committee for the position of Director of the Bureau of Economic Security (BES) will not review its decision regarding the candidacy for the position.

The commission members stated this during a meeting on July 14.

"The commissionʼs task has been completed, the decision made by the commission is still valid. We do not have the authority to make any other decisions. I think we cannot return to any other stages of the competition or propose a new candidate. I propose to return this package of documents so that they can make a decision in accordance with the laws that must be followed in the process of such a decision," said Donatas Malaskevičius.

He also added that the letter from SBU regarding the candidacy of the winner of the competition Oleksandr Tsyvinsky did not contain any new information: "In essence, all the information in the SBU letter was considered by the commission when making the decision."

"In my opinion, the commission has fulfilled its task: we have completed the work, we have taken all measures required by law, we have approved the procedure for conducting the competition, we have announced the competition, we have collected documents, admitted candidates who met the criteria, we have conducted various tests and practical tasks," said the head of the commission Laura Stefan.

She announced that the documents that the government sent to the commission with a request to submit new candidacies will be returned to the Cabinet of Ministers today without adopting new decisions.

What preceded

On June 20, 2024, the Verkhovna Rada adopted in the second reading a bill on the reboot of the BES. The bill provides for mandatory recertification of employees, and also establishes that international partners will have the decisive voice in the selection and recertification of employees.

The law stipulates that the new head of BES must be elected by a commission of six members, half of whom are international experts with the right to cast a decisive vote.

Rebooting the Bureau of Economic Security is one of the conditions for Ukraine in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Extended Fund Facility. EU support is also tied to this reform.

At the end of June, the competition for the position of the BES director was won by Oleksandr Tsyvinsky, a detective from the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU). His candidacy was submitted to the government for consideration on June 30.

On July 7, it became known that the government did not approve Tsyvinsky for the position of director of BES and is asking the commission to resubmit the candidacy.

Tsyvinsky claims that for him it is “a matter of principle” to find out what “security assessments” were the basis for the authorities’ respective decision. He stated that as a law enforcement officer he “successfully passed all SBU inspections” for 10 years, and also served in the Main Intelligence Directorate (known as GUR) of the Ministry of Defense since the beginning of the full-scale invasion.

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