The Bureau of Economic Security (BES) was created in 2021 to reduce pressure on business: it should be transferred to those economic cases that were previously investigated by SBU, SBI, and the National Police.
The first head of the Bureau was unable to establish its work, so in 2024 the parliament passed a law on rebooting the BES. A special commission was to select up to two candidates for the position of head and recommend them to the prime minister. A transparent competition is a requirement of Western partners. BES must have a new director by July 27 so that Ukraine receives a tranche of international aid of $3 billion.
The commission that was to conduct the competition was selected by the government a month and a half late. It included six representatives. Three of them are from Western partners, they have the deciding vote. Three more members of the commission were proposed by the government.
The commission became operational in December 2024. It received applications from 43 candidates, tested them on their knowledge of the law and professional skills, eliminated most of them, and finally interviewed 16 candidates. The commission asked them about everything — cars, houses, apartments, plagiarism in scientific papers, and relativesʼ ties to Russia.
On June 24, the competition commission finally announced the finalist on its second attempt.
During the vote, the commission was divided equally, and precisely by "nationality" — into "Ukrainian" and "international" parts. Ukrainian members voted for their finalists, international members — for Oleksandr Tsyvinsky. By law, the last word remained with the "internationalists" — so the commission chose Oleksandr Tsyvinsky. It is his candidacy that the commission will submit to Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal. He will have ten days to approve it.
ЛьвДУВС
Who elects the director of BEB?
Laura Stefan — Chair of the Commission, Founder and Executive Director of the Expert Forum, international expert on anti-corruption reform for the European Commission, the World Bank, and the United Nations Development Program;
James Wasserstrom — Founder and executive director of the Integrity and Refuge Foundation in Canada, founder and executive director/senior consultant of “The Wasserstrorri Group” in Greece;
Donatas Malaskevičius — Head of the Lithuanian Police Liaison Office at Europol, expert on corruption prevention of the EU Project on Strengthening the Resilience of Integrated Border Management in Ukraine;
Oleh Hylyaka — Deputy Chief Scientific Secretary and Head of the Strategic Development Department of the National Academy of Legal Sciences.
Tetyana Matselyk — professor at the Department of Financial and Tax Law of the State Tax University.
Yuriy Ponomarenko — the head of the Department of Criminal Law at the Yaroslav the Wise National Law University.
Candidate for the position of the BES head is Oleksandr Tsyvinsky, a former police investigator and head of the NABU detective unit
Oleksandr Tsyvinsky is almost 43 years old. He was born in Lviv, graduated from the Lviv State University of Internal Affairs, worked as an investigator in a regional department, rose to the rank of head of the department. He resigned in 2015 after winning a competition announced by the newly created NABU. There, he worked his way up from detective to head of the detective unit.
Tsyvinsky investigated several high-profile cases. Among them were the case of "Avakovʼs backpacks" and the "Clean City" case, where the main figure was Denys Komarnytsky. In 2023, he participated in the competition for the position of the NABU head, reached the final stage, but did not receive the position.
The competition commission questioned Oleksandr Tsyvinsky about his property — but briefly. It asked him to explain how he received a disciplinary sanction. The main questions concerned his family.
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Tsyvinsky has been married since 2004 and has two sons, aged 17 and 12. The commission asked him about his family members, as his eldest son is currently in the UK. Tsyvinsky explained that in February 2022, he and his wife remained in Kyiv, but decided to evacuate the children abroad.
The younger son went to the UK in the summer of 2022, and the older joined him in early 2023. They decided to take their younger son to Kyiv six months ago. The older son is on all military records and is currently studying in college.
“Then he will make a decision about returning,” Tsyvinsky said.
Another question for Tsyvinsky concerned the UAH 100 000 in material assistance he received in 2020. He explained that in 2014 he volunteered for the ATO, and when he returned, he applied to the Lviv City Council, which issued this assistance. The paperwork took several years because he lived in two cities — Kyiv and Lviv.
Tsyvinskyʼs wife — Mariana — is a psychologist and forensic expert, conducts examinations in criminal proceedings (according to Babel, she is a member of the board of polygraph examiners). During the interview, the commission asked about a possible conflict of interest, since his wife cooperates as a forensic expert, including with NABU. Tsyvinsky assured that neither he nor his unit involve her in the proceedings.
"Sometimes the Bureau calls her, sometimes lawyers, in cases related to the NABU," he said, adding that his wife does not cooperate with BES.
Колегія поліграфологів України
In 2023, Oleksandr Tsyvinskyi graduated from the postgraduate program of the Lviv State University of Internal Affairs and received a doctoral degree. He entered postgraduate study in 2019, went to war in 2022, returned from the Defense Forces and then defended his doctoral thesis.
The commission asked whether he used the work of other scientists without citing them. As Tsyvinskyi said, his dissertation was checked for plagiarism, no violations were found, and based on the results of his research, the “norms” that regulate economic expertise were changed.
The media wrote that Oleksandr Tsyvinskyʼs father lives in Russia. According to journalists, his father served in the USSR and after 1991 remained in Russia, where he can now receive a pension. During the last interview, the commission did not ask Tsyvinsky about his father — but this question was asked in previous competitions. At that time, he said that since 2014 he has only called his father once or twice a year. All the documents he and his relatives have indicate his fatherʼs Ukrainian citizenship.
The work of the commission was monitored by public organizations — they warned that SBU and the government were deliberately disrupting the competition, through a special inspection (but there is no direct evidence of this)
Each candidate for the position of director of BES must undergo a special check. In March, the commission asked the Secretariat of the Cabinet of Ministers to check 16 finalists. Then the Secretariat of the Government sent requests to the SBU, the Foreign Intelligence Service, and the Ministry of Education and Science. In particular, they checked military registration and compliance with the rules for access to state secrets.
By mid-April, almost all the answers had been received, only the Security Service was delayed. In mid-April, the commission asked the SBU to hurry up and provide any other information necessary to assess the integrity of the candidates. And on May 15, the government announced: all 16 candidates had successfully passed the test. Therefore, interviews were scheduled for June 8. By this date, the contestants had already passed all the preliminary stages of the competition. All that remained was an interview with the commission members.
On June 5, the commission received a letter from the SBU asking for more time (the document was dated May 24). By a strange coincidence, it was on June 5 that information appeared on the website with a dubious reputation "Stopkor" that the father of one of the finalists Oleksandr Skomarov had a Russian passport.
Then the commission asked SBU to complete the verification in time so that interviews could begin. But on June 7, three members of the commission, delegated by the government, proposed postponing the interviews until a response from SBU was received. The foreign members of the commission were against it, but they could not interfere — government representatives simply did not come to the meeting.
It was then that public activists accused the members of the commission from the government and SBU of disrupting the competition. According to them, they were doing this on the instructions of the deputy head of the Presidentʼs Office (OP) Oleh Tatarov, but there is no direct evidence of this.
On June 10, SBU replied to the commission that due to the major war, it could not quickly verify ties with Russia. The service noted that three finalists had ties to the aggressor state, so it needed time for a thorough check. So the commission scheduled the final interviews for June 21-23.
However, on June 24, SBU sent the commission another letter. The service said it was still vetting the candidates, that three of them had ties to Russia, and that it did not rule out the possibility of having to take polygraph tests.
The commission members explained that they were Oleksandr Tsyvinsky, Viktor Dubovik, and Oleksandr Skomarov. Nevertheless, the commission voted — and elected Oleksandr Tsyvinsky. He must then be approved by the prime minister — but the final appointment of the head of BES is still in question.