SBU reported that there is no reason not to appoint Tsyvinsky as director of the Bureau of Economic Security

There are no reasons not to appoint Oleksandr Tsyvinsky as director of the Bureau of Economic Security of Ukraine (BES).

This was reported to the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) at his request.

According to Oleksandr Tsyvinsky, SBU did not receive any request from the government regarding his candidacy. The agency also said that the check was conducted solely on the basis of an appeal from the head of the competition commission Laura Stefan.

The letter to which the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine (CMU) referred is dated June 30, that is, after the competition was completed, the commissionʼs decision was made, and the documents were transferred to the government. There is no second copy of the letter. It was destroyed after it was returned from CMU.

Tsyvinsky emphasizes that there is currently no document that officially contains "security risks".

"A state institution that should protect the economy should start not with maneuvers, but with principles. I passed an open competition. All documents have been submitted. The commissionʼs decision has been adopted. Now the decision is up to the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine," he summed up.

What preceded

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 asked the commission to resubmit the candidacy. The commission refused to review the winnerʼs candidacy.

The Cabinet of Ministers studied “additional materials from SBU” that “relate to national security issues” and contain “security assessments”. Such additional materials, for example, could have been the results of Tsyvinsky’s polygraph test. At least, SBU warned about this in a letter that the commission received on the day of voting for the winner of the competition. In it, SBU warned that it was still checking candidates, three of them have ties to Russia, and it did not rule out that it would have to check candidates with a polygraph. But according to Babel, neither Tsyvinsky nor the other contestants passed the polygraph.

Tsyvinsky himself stated that for him it was “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 had “successfully passed all SBU inspections” for 10 years, and had also served in the Main Intelligence Directorate (known as GUR) of the Ministry of Defense since the beginning of the full-scale invasion.

In an appeal published on the website of the Institute for Socio-Economic Transformation (ISET), more than 50 public organizations called on the new government to appoint Oleksandr Tsyvinsky as the new director of BES.

On July 24, the Selection Commission for the head of the BES resubmitted documents on the appointment of Tsyvinsky to the Cabinet of Ministers. The MP from “Voice” Yaroslav Zheleznyak reported on July 20 that the government had not appointed Tsyvinsky to the position.

Commission Chair Laura Stefan said on July 30 that the government should appoint the director of the Bureau by the end of the month.

On June 20, 2024, the Verkhovna Rada adopted in the second reading a bill on the reboot of 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.

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