The team of the NGO “Anti-Corruption headquarters” has created a website that simplifies the corruption investigations conducted by journalists and civic activists. “‘Hidden interests’ is, in fact, a database of companies that are directly or indirectly linked to Kyiv city council deputies and top officials,” informed Halyna Yanchenko, chairman of the NGO “Anticorruption headquarter” during a press briefing at Ukraine Crisis Media Center.
The key functional of the website is very simple. Search is performed by the person’s name, company’s name or EDRPOU code. It takes some seconds for the “automatic analyzer” to find a match between the database and content of the downloaded document of any size. The main target groups of this resource are journalists, active citizens and businesses that want to play fair. “Anti-corruption activists will be able to use our website to prevent conflicts of interests, i.e., an unhealthy lobbying for their companies and benefits to their business performed by deputies,” noted Halyna Yanchenko.
“In the process of compiling our database, we found about 600 companies belonging to 120 deputies of Kyiv City Council, 45 top officials of the city administration and 10 district administrations. Of these nearly 600 companies, 96 turned out to be NGOs and 34 are charitable organizations,” informed Anton Marchuk, an analyst with the NGO “Anticorruption headquarter”. Some deputies of Kyiv City Council are co-founders of one and the same NGO, which can be used as proof of a direct or indirect connection between different MPs. According to Mr. Marchuk, of 23 members of Kyiv City Council Land Commission, 12 have their own interests or in some way are linked to the construction companies, i.e., have the potential conflict of interests.
The organization plans adding profiles of top officials and regional deputies of such large cities as Lviv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, as well as profiles of MPs, to the database. Besides, it will try to partially automate the database filling and updating, conduct presentations and trainings on using the database and analyzer for journalists.
