How prosecutors got their million-dollar pensions without disabilities: another simple secret
Disabled prosecutors have become a major scandal this month and have already led to the resignation of Prosecutor General Andrii Kostin. However, the resignation of the Prosecutor General does not solve the problem. Therefore, it is important to carefully analyze how this became possible. Because not only prosecutors and the MSEC may be to blame.
After Yurii Butusov's article about disabled prosecutors (and pensioners) from the Khmelnytskyi Prosecutor's Office, Censor.NET decided to analyse the declarations of other employees of regional prosecutor's offices in different regions of Ukraine.
Our analysis showed that the highest pensions went to representatives of the Kharkiv region.
For example, Stanislav Muratov, the deputy head of the Kharkiv Prosecutor's Office, received UAH 1,152,155 in pension in 2023. For the first time, he indicated his pension in his 2020 declaration. Muratov was born in 1981 and is only 43 years old. He has been working in the prosecutor's office since 2003. In 2020, he was appointed deputy regional prosecutor.
In 2021, some media outlets even called Muratov a candidate for regional prosecutor, and the then-head of the region, Anna Tymchuk, and the region's "grey cardinal" Vadym Sliusarev, were allegedly behind this appointment.
However, this story is not about these rumours.
And something else.
Apart from Muratov, one of the highest pensions is paid to Andrii Kravchenko, deputy head of the Kharkiv regional prosecutor's office (39 years old). In 2023, he received UAH 1,015,225 in pension. The pension first appeared in Kravchenko's declaration in 2021.
The top three is rounded off by the head of the Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor's Office, Oleksandr Filchakov (45 years old). In 2023, he declared UAH 823,071 of pension. According to the declaration, he started receiving it in 2020.
And here's the interesting thing. In a commentary to journalists, the spokesman for the Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor's Office, Dmytro Chubenko, said that neither the head of the Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor's Office, Oleksandr Filchakov, nor his deputies have any disabilities of any group. They receive a long service pension.
Immediately after Yurii Butusov's post about disabled prosecutors in Khmelnytskyi appeared, the author received a call from a law enforcement officer he knew who described the scheme in detail.
The second group's disability allowed prosecutors to receive pensions after 10 years of service, instead of 25.
However, based on the comments made by the spokesperson for the Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor's Office, it appears that local prosecutors received their exorbitant pensions not even because of their disability.
Then how, you may ask?
According to the law, prosecutors are entitled to a pension regardless of age, if they have 25 years of service, including at least 15 years of work experience in prosecutorial positions. The amount of the pension should be 60% of the monthly salary, but not more than 10 subsistence minimums (UAH 29,200).
That is, even if a theoretical deputy regional prosecutor has a salary of 1.4 million, he or she should receive only less than 30,000 in pension according to the law.
So is there another way to improve financial situation? Yes, there is. Restrictions on payments were established by amendments to the legislation in 2015.
The previous version of the law read as follows: "prosecutors and investigators with at least 20 years of work experience, including at least 10 years of work experience as prosecutors and investigators of the prosecutor's office, are entitled to a pension for length of service regardless of age. The pension is granted in the amount of 80 per cent of their monthly (current) salary, which includes all types of remuneration subject to insurance contributions, received before the month of application for the pension. For each full year of work over 10 years in these positions, the pension is increased by 2 per cent, but not more than 90 per cent of the amount of monthly (current) earnings."
Thus, all our virtuous prosecutors with 15+ years of experience can collect papers in the accounting department and go to court with a lawsuit. They will say, "Dear sir, I didn't sign up for this, when I joined the service, I was promised a 90% pension. So recalculate it!
"And so they take the month in which they received their salary, money for leave, financial assistance, and some other additional payments. And with the sum of, say, 150 thousand, they go to court, where they ask to establish their pension at the rate of 90%, as it was before 2016," says the Censor.NET source.
Somewhere in here we could mention that Muratov's wife had worked for a long time as a judge of the Kyivskyi Court of Kharkiv. But this is not even what interests us.
"Even if the court had ruled in favour of the prosecutor, the Pension Fund could have appealed against it in appeal and cassation. But try to find such decisions. How many are there? Because the price of such non-appeal often amounted to up to $20,000 for Pension Fund employees," the source said.
To verify the above, the author opened the register of court decisions to look at the decisions on the above issues.
For example, in October of this year, the Kyiv District Administrative Court considered an appeal by a prosecutor of the Specialised Prosecutor's Office to the Main Department of the Pension Fund of Ukraine in Kyiv Region to review a pension.
The case was considered in a simplified claim procedure.
As a result, the court ruled in favour of the plaintiff.
But the interesting thing here is that the defendant did not exercise its right to file a response to the statement of claim.
On 14 October, the Kharkiv District Administrative Court considered a complaint filed by another prosecutor who expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that he was robbed of 124.4 hryvnias every month, and instead of 80124 hryvnias, he was paid only 79999.40 hryvnias.
One of the claims reads as follows: "To oblige the Main Department of the Pension Fund of Ukraine in Kharkiv region to provide information, namely: what amount of pension was paid to PERSON_1 in September 2024 from the basic amount of average earnings - UAH 78750.00? To provide information on the amount of additional pension to disabled persons of group 2 from among the liquidators of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant Post. No. 112, clause 5 was paid to PERSON_1 in September 2024? Provide information on the amount of the increase for the disabled army personnel equated to war veterans of group 2 (40% of UAH 2361) paid to PERSON_1 in September 2024? Provide information on the amount of targeted assistance to group II war veterans paid to PERSON_1 in September 2024? Provide information on why, arithmetically, the amount of the accrued components of PERSON_1's pension is 80124 UAH in September 2024, and 79999.40 UAH was actually paid, where 124.60 UAH disappear every month, and 1121.40 UAH in total since the beginning of the year, i.e. who is stealing them?"
It probably won't surprise you to learn that the court found that the request was written within the law and therefore concluded "that the stated claims were justified".
And it shouldn't surprise you that the Pension Fund didn't get involved in the dispute either.
"In resolving this dispute, the court also took into account the defendant's failure to file a response to the claim, which, by virtue of the provisions of Part 4 of Article 159 of the ACC of Ukraine, may be qualified by the court as an admission of the claim," the ruling said.
Let's look at how such cases were considered a few years ago.
On 18 May 2021, the Zhytomyr Administrative Court considered another prosecutor's complaint.
In it, the applicant asked "to declare unlawful the actions and cancel the defendant's decision to unreasonably reduce the percentage of the already granted pension to the components of earnings taken into account for the recalculation of the pension from 90% to 60% when recalculating and paying monthly pension benefits from 01.04.2019".
The plaintiff also asked for a review of his pension payments starting from April 2020. For clarity, before the recalculation, the amount of the pension was UAH 66948.70, and after the recalculation, it was UAH 40169.22.
According to the decision of the Zhytomyr District Administrative Court dated 23 December 2020, the claim was fully satisfied.
Disagreeing with the decision, the defendant (the Pension Fund) filed an appeal, in which it requested that the decision be cancelled and a new decision be issued dismissing the claim.
However, the court did not satisfy the appeal and ruled that the pension should be recalculated and paid at 90%.
In 2017, the Pechersk Court of Kyiv considered a lawsuit filed by the deputy head of the Kyiv City Prosecutor's Office. The prosecutor demanded that the amount of her pension be reconsidered to reflect her new salary.
And here ... the court refused, noting that "the amendments to Article 50-1 of the Law of Ukraine "On the Prosecutor's Office" regarding the amount of pension in percentage terms relate to the procedure for granting pensions to prosecutors and investigators in case they exercise their right to pension provision, and not to the recalculation of the pension already granted".
There is also a court decision where the prosecutor was denied a review of his pension and was told that he would receive it with a 10% limit. This decision was made in December 2021 by the Third Administrative Court of Appeal, overturning the decision of the Dnipropetrovsk District Administrative Court.
"The court notes that the application of 90 per cent in the recalculation of pensions, taking into account the certificate of the Kirovohrad Regional Prosecutor's Office of 19.03.2021 No. 1-90vih21 , puts pensioners from among prosecutors to whom pensions are recalculated in an unequal position with prosecutors who are currently receiving pensions in accordance with the Law of Ukraine "On the Prosecutor's Office" of 14.10.014 No. 1697-VІІ. Therefore, the court does not see any narrowing and limitation of the content and scope of of PERSON_1's right, since the amount of the long-service pension is compensated by an increase in the salary of working prosecutors and such a calculation will be proportionate and appropriate in comparison with the amount of long-service pensions for prosecutors who are granted a pension in accordance with the Law of Ukraine No. 1697-VII "On the Prosecutor's Office" of 14.10.2014 and with the application of increased salaries of the relevant categories of employees," the ruling says.
But for the most part, the courts rule in favour of prosecutors. And here they play with the decisions of the Constitutional Court, among other things. This is, for example, what the Odesa judges relied on in their decision when they agreed to recalculate pensions by 90%.
According to the new wording of part twenty of Article 86 of Law No. 1697-VII, the conditions and procedure for recalculating pensions granted to prosecutors were to be determined by the Cabinet of Ministers.
On 30 August 2017, the Cabinet of Ministers adopted Resolution No. 657 "On Amendments to Certain Resolutions of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine on Remuneration of Prosecutors", the annexes to which approved new increased salary schemes for prosecutors.
Somewhere after that, prosecutors began to sue en masse. But the Pension Fund's branches claim that the Cabinet of Ministers has not prescribed a procedure for reviewing pensions.
Suddenly, by the decision of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine of 13.12.2019, the new version of Part 20 of Article 86 of the Law on the Prosecutor's Office was cancelled and returned to the old version.
It reads again as follows: "Pensions granted to prosecutors shall be recalculated in connection with the increase of salaries to prosecutors at the level of conditions and components of salaries of the respective categories of employees serving in the bodies and institutions of the prosecutor's office at the time of the right to recalculation. Pensions are recalculated from the first day of the month following the month in which the circumstances that lead to a change in the amount of the pension occurred. If the pensioner has acquired the right to a pension increase, the difference in the pension for the past time can be paid to him/her for no more than 12 months. The pension of working pensioners is also recalculated in connection with the appointment to a higher position, increase in length of service, awarding of an honorary title or academic degree and increase in the amount of components of his/her salary in accordance with the procedure provided for in parts two, three and four of this Article, upon dismissal from work or for every two years worked."
At the same time, the courts believe that all those who received pensions before the 2015 amendments may be entitled to a pension review without restrictions. At least, this is the rationale contained in the decision of the Odesa court (Fifth Administrative Court of Appeal).
Proper juggling of norms and no quackery. For sure.
Tetiana Nikolaienko, Censor. NET
