Appointment of the BES head — the winner of the competition Tsyvinsky agreed to take a polygraph after talking with the PM Svyrydenko

Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko and the winner of the competition for the position of head of the Bureau of Economic Security (BES) Oleksandr Tsyvinsky agreed that he would take a polygraph test.

Svyrydenko and Tsyvinsky wrote about this on Facebook.

Svyrydenko wrote that she expects to make a decision on the appointment of the head of BES next week. According to her, this will allow to update the Bureau and will be a significant contribution to a positive reset of relations between the state and business.

"I confirm that the conversation with the prime minister was constructive and to the point. We agreed to act openly and clearly to remove all questions and move forward," Tsyvinsky commented.

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 the candidates — three of them have ties to Russia, and it does not rule out that it will have to check the 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 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 Bureauʼs director by the end of the month.

SBU stated on July 31 that there was no reason not to appoint Tsyvinsky as director of BES.

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.

For more news and in-depth stories from Ukraine, please follow us on X.