NYT1.

IN A RARE MOVE, SINGAPORE CHARGES A GOVERNMENT

MINISTER WITH CORRUPTION
By Sui-Lee Wee, Jan. 18, 2024
Accused of accepting tickets to “Hamilton,” air travel and soccer games in
Britain, the transport official resigned before he pleaded not guilty in court.
It was an unprecedented set of events in Singapore: a government minister charged
with corruption and then hauled to court. …
S. Iswaran, the transport minister, was formally accused on Monday of taking bribes
including a ride on a private jet and tickets to the musical “Hamilton” and soccer
games in Britain. By the time he appeared in court on Thursday and pleaded not
guilty, he had resigned from his post.
Singapore has long touted a squeaky clean image and a lack of graft. But in recent
months, several scandals have tarnished the governing People’s Action Party’s
reputation — and, in effect, the country’s.
Allegations of impropriety involving Mr. Iswaran became public in July. Prime
Minister Lee Hsien Loong ordered him to take a leave of absence while the
authorities investigated Mr. Iswaran’s dealings involving a billionaire who helped
bring the Formula 1 auto race to Singapore. The charges unveiled against him
include two counts of corruption and one charge of obstructing justice. He is also
facing 24 counts of “obtaining, as a public servant, valuable things” worth more
than hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“One can’t deny that this is a body blow to the P.A.P., to the government and to
Singapore,” said Eugene Tan, an associate professor of law at Singapore
Management University. “This is a system that has always prided itself in high
public life standards and incorruptibility. When you have a series of allegations that
a minister had compromised himself, that does raise legitimate concerns.”
In addition to Mr. Iswaran’s case, the P.A.P. last year faced questions of
impropriety in the real estate dealings of two ministers involving government
bungalows, and pertaining to the speaker of Parliament’s extramarital affair with
another lawmaker. Although the government found no evidence of wrongdoing or
corruption in the real estate matter, the incident raised questions about the
privileged positions that ministers have in Singapore at a time of rising living costs.
Singapore has consistently been lauded for its lack of graft. It was the fifth-least-
corrupt country in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index in
2022, the only Asian country in the top 10.
Mr. Lee, the prime minister, said the government has and will continue to deal with
Mr. Iswaran’s case “rigorously in accordance with the law.”
“I am determined to uphold the integrity of the party and the government, and our
reputation for honesty and incorruptibility,” Mr. Lee said in a statement.
“Singaporeans expect no less.”
Voters get to weigh in during the next general election, which has to be held by
2025. The P.A.P.’s share of the popular vote has slid in recent elections, and it is
facing a growing challenge from an opposition that has criticized the P.A.P.’s
decades-long, one-party dominance.
The party is also 10 months away from a major leadership transition, during which
Mr. Lee, the prime minister, is expected to step down and hand power to the so-
called 4G, or “fourth generation,” of leaders that included Mr. Iswaran.
Lawrence Wong, who is set to take over as prime minister, emphasized the party’s
stance on graft.
“The P.A.P. stance on corruption is non-negotiable, this is part of our DNA,” Mr.
Wong told reporters. “There can be no compromise, no relaxation, no fudging on
this, no matter the political price.”
Mr. Iswaran has said that he would return all the money that he had earned as a
minister and a member of Parliament since being placed under investigation in July.
During that period, the government had reduced his monthly wages as a cabinet
minister to $6,300, a fraction of the benchmark ministerial monthly salary of about
$41,000. (Singapore’s ministers are among the most highly paid in the world, and
the government has justified this in the past by saying it would prevent corruption.)
On Thursday, the government made public a letter he had written to Mr. Lee, dated
Tuesday, saying he was resigning and would “focus on clearing my name.”
Nearly all the charges against Mr. Iswaran stem from his dealings with the
billionaire property tycoon Ong Beng Seng, who brought the Formula 1 race to
Singapore in 2008 and is also under investigation.Twenty-four of the charges stem
from November 2015 to December 2021, when Mr. Iswaran is accused of obtaining
from Mr. Ong “valuable things” with a total value of about $160,000, according to
Singapore’s corruption watchdog.
These include tickets in Britain to “The Book of Mormon,” “Hamilton” and soccer
games of the English Premier League, according to local media reports. He is also
accused of accepting tickets to the Formula One race in Singapore, as well as a
flight to Doha, Qatar, on Mr. Ong’s private jet, a one-night stay at the Four Seasons
in Doha and a business-class ticket from Doha to Singapore, the broadcaster said.
The two charges of corruption pertain to Mr. Iswaran allegedly receiving bribes
totaling about $124,000 from Mr. Ong in September and December 2022, according
to Singapore’s corruption watchdog. These were allegedly in return for advancing
the tycoon’s business interests involving the Singapore Grand Prix, as the Formula
1 race there is known, and the Singapore Tourism Board.
If found guilty, Mr. Iswaran is likely to face imprisonment. But few expect him to
face an extremely lengthy jail term — the judge is likely to rule that any sentences
could be served concurrently and hand down a proportionate term for the charges.

NYT2. POLICE SEARCH PARIS 2024 OLYMPICS OFFICES IN

CORRUPTION INVESTIGATION
By Aurelien Breeden, June 20, 2023
French prosecutors said they were investigating potential conflicts of interest,
embezzlement and favoritism connected to public contracts signed by
organizers of the Games.
The French police searched the headquarters of the Paris 2024 Olympics organizing
committee and other offices on Tuesday as part of two corruption investigations
over contracts signed in connection with the Games, prosecutors said.
While the scope and nature of the investigations were not fully clear on Tuesday,
the investigations threatened to tarnish an image of integrity and transparency that
the authorities overseeing the Paris 2024 plans had sought to project, after a string
of past Olympic bids that were riddled by corruption allegations.
The offices of the Paris 2024 organizing committee, in Seine-Saint-Denis, a
northern suburb of Paris, and those of a separate body in charge of Games-related
infrastructure, in western Paris, were both searched by investigators, according to
the National Financial Prosecutor’s office.
The prosecutor’s office, which handles high-level financial crimes and offenses,
said that the searches were being carried out as part of two separate investigations,
both inquiries into potential conflicts of interest, embezzlement and favoritism.
The first, opened in 2017, is related to procurement contracts signed by the Paris
2024 Olympics organizing committee, which is in charge of planning, organizing
and financing the Games, in coordination with Paris City Hall, the International
Olympic Committee, and the French sports authorities.
The second was opened in 2022 after an inspection that was carried out by the
French Anticorruption Agency, an official government watchdog. It relates to
procurement contracts signed by the organizing committee and by SOLIDEO, a
body overseeing permanent Games-related construction that is currently supervising
58 Olympic and Paralympic projects, according to the company’s website.
The National Financial Prosecutor’s office did not provide further details on the
nature of the contracts.
In 2021, the news agency Agence France-Presse reported that a confidential report
by the French Anticorruption Agency on the organization of the 2024 games in
Paris had warned of the “risks of impropriety” and “conflicts of interest” in the
process.
Representatives for the organizing committee and for SOLIDEO confirmed the
searches but did not provide details, saying only that they were “fully cooperating”
with investigators.
A spokesperson for the organizing committee said that it had “stringent procedures”
in place “to ensure the transparency and propriety of the several hundred contracts it
has awarded.”
Multiple audits by the French Anticorruption Agency and by the Cour des Comptes,
France’s national auditing agency, “have not raised the slightest wrongdoing,” the
spokesperson added.
The Olympic Games will run from July 26 to Aug. 11 next year, and the Paralympic
Games from Aug. 28 to Sept. 6. The games are expected to draw over 10,000
athletes and millions of spectators, in a very different atmosphere from the last ones,
which were held in Tokyo in 2021 under strict Covid related protocols.
In January, the Cour des Comptes, estimated that the Games would cost nearly 9
billion euros, or $9.8 billion, up from an initial assessment of 6.9 billion euros in the
bidding phase.
Judicial investigations can take years in France, and it was not yet clear whether the
two inquiries disclosed on Tuesday would end with charges.
But Tony Estanguet, the president of the Paris 2024 Olympic organizing committee,
had stressed that he wanted the organization’s conduct to be spotless.
“There is a shared determination to make these Games an exemplary project from
every point of view: in terms of budgetary rigor, transparency and the
environment,” he told Le Parisien in 2017, the year Paris won its bid to host the
Games.
Organizers of Olympic Games in other countries have faced similar investigations
in the past, repeatedly casting doubts on the integrity of the process.
In February, Japanese prosecutors accused Dentsu, a Japanese advertising giant, and
other companies of conspiring to evade the public bidding process leading up to the
Games, as part of a broad investigation into corruption surrounding the Tokyo
Olympics.
In 2021, Carlos Arthur Nuzman, the former longtime head of Brazil’s Olympic
committee, was sentenced to more than 30 years in prison after a judge in Brazil
ruled that Rio de Janeiro’s success at securing the 2016 Summer Games was built
on a bribery scheme. The decision came four years after he was detained as part of a
joint investigation into sports corruption by investigators in Brazil and France.
And in the late 1990s, a bribery scandal erupted around the process in which Salt
Lake City won the bid for the 2002 Winter Games, with a senior Olympic official
acknowledging widespread corruption and two chief organizers indicted on charges
that included conspiracy to commit bribery. Those organizers were ultimately
acquitted by a federal judge, but the five-year scandal tainted the Games.
NYT3. CORRUPTION IS AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO UKRAINE, AND
UKRAINIANS KNOW IT
By Farah Stockman, Sept. 10, 2023
President Biden talks of the world being divided into autocracies and democracies.
But a more important division exists: between kleptocracies, where leaders treat
their nations like personal piggy banks, and places where corruption is the exception
rather than the rule.
Since 2014, Ukrainians have been fighting to drag their country into that second
category. The Maidan revolution, which sent a pro-Russian president packing,
wasn’t just about freeing Ukraine from Russian influence. It was also about
breaking the stranglehold of oligarchs who - as in so many former Soviet republics -
controlled everything from television stations to the politicians on ballots. The fight
against corruption amounts to a second front in Ukraine’s war against Russia.
Ukraine is making progress, no small feat in the middle of a hot war. But it is still
ranked the second most corrupt country in Europe, after Russia, according to
Transparency International. Since the February 2022 Russian invasion, a host of
characters - from arms dealers to suppliers of soldiers’ meals - has stood to reap big
profits, creating vested interests in prolonging the conflict.
Corruption has been the elephant in the room since the invasion - an unpopular
subject in Washington, since it risks undermining the American support that
Ukraine desperately needs.
But guess who hasn’t shied away from calling out corruption in Ukraine?
Ukrainians. No one knows better what an existential threat corruption can be,
sapping the public trust and the legitimacy of the state. Ukrainians consider
corruption the country’s second-most-serious problem, behind only the Russian
invasion, according to a poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of
Sociology this year. They know that they must root out money laundering and the
influence of oligarchs as a condition of joining the European Union. Since the war
started, the percentage of Ukrainians who say they are willing to stand up for their
rights when they interact with bureaucrats doubled - from 26 percent in 2021 to 52
percent this year. That raises hopes that Ukrainians are starting to resist corruption
with the same can-do spirit that repelled the Russian invasion.
Yuriy Nikolov, a founder of the online news platform Nashi Groshi (Our Money),
broke stories about the Ukrainian Defense Ministry paying huge markups for
supplies - 46 cents for eggs that should have cost five cents, $86 for winter coats
that were worth just $29. A week ago, President Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed his
defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, who, although not personally implicated, had
been tarnished by the scandal.
Another Ukrainian platform, Bihus, exposes expensive cars and luxury vacations
purchased by politicians since the invasion. It took aim at Bohdan Torokhtiy, a
lawmaker whose wife, Alina Levchenko, documented high-end stays at resorts and
villas across Europe and the Middle East on Instagram in the early days of the
Russian invasion while other Ukrainians were fending off the attack. It also reported
that she had been hired as an adviser to an executive at Antonov, a state-owned
aircraft company, despite having no experience in the industry. She didn’t reply to
my request for comment on social media. Her Instagram account has since become
private.
Ukrainian lawmakers are pushing back against the scrutiny. For more than a year,
Ukrainian watchdog groups and the international agencies that fund them have been
encouraging the government to reinstate wealth declarations by politicians, a
requirement that was suspended in the early days of the invasion. Last week,
lawmakers in Kyiv passed a bill that would reinstate the obligation to declare but
keep the information closed to the public for a year or longer. In less than 24 hours,
more than 83,000 people signed a petition asking Mr. Zelensky to veto the bill.
“Many Ukrainians are unhappy with this decision of the Parliament,” Andrii
Borovyk, the executive director of Transparency International Ukraine, told me.
“Attention is very big.”
Vitalii Shabunin, the chairman of the board of the nonprofit Anti-Corruption Action
Center in Kyiv, wrote a scathing column about the decision in Ukrainian Pravda, an
online newspaper based in Kyiv. Access to declarations has helped expose “top
corrupt people,” he wrote. Now lawmakers “want to keep the ‘war fortunes’ of
officials a secret and absolve themselves of crime.”
Mr. Zelensky has been on a mission to convince Ukrainians and donor countries
that he has things under control. In May the chief of Ukraine’s Supreme Court was
arrested on bribery charges. In June another judge, who hid $150,000 worth of
bribes in pickle jars and fled the country to Moldova, received a 10-year sentence
after a bizarre incident in which he was forcibly returned to Ukraine. This month,
Ihor Kolomoisky, an oligarch who once served as a governor, was arrested in
Ukraine nearly two years after the U.S. Department of Justice accused him of
embezzling billions of dollars from a private Ukrainian bank that he owned and
laundering the money by buying real estate in Cleveland and other American cities.
His arrest will boost the Ukrainian public’s confidence that the war on corruption
can be won. But anti-corruption watchdogs in Ukraine aren’t thrilled with how he
was taken into custody. The security services grabbed Mr. Kolomoisky before the
National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, which is seen as more independent,
got the chance. The bureau had been preparing to prosecute him on far more serious
charges.
The Ukrainian people should be applauded — and supported — for battling
corruption. In one sign of support, the White House recently met with a delegation
of anti-corruption groups.
But there’s a danger that these arrests will weaken American enthusiasm for the
war. Some Republicans are pushing for the appointment of a special inspector
general for Ukraine, like the office that was created for Afghanistan. Before we
spend a fortune on a new inspector general, we should make sure that we’re staffing
the inspectors general that already exist. (The State Department’s inspector general
post, for instance, has been vacant for three years.) We should also boost our
support for Ukrainian investigators who can demand accountability from their
government in perpetuity rather than create an American agency that will disappear
over time.
That’s perhaps the biggest lesson of Afghanistan. We didn’t fail in Afghanistan
because we couldn’t stop corruption. We failed because we didn’t foster Afghan
institutions that could withstand a U.S. withdrawal. Americans were so worried
about stamping out corruption that they micromanaged everything, creating a
shadow government - staffed by temporary, highly paid consultants that answered
to Washington. They wrote beautiful reports but weren’t accountable to the people
who mattered most: Afghans. The special inspector general of Afghanistan
reconstruction acknowledged as much in a report released this year: “In order to
control for corruption,” it read, Americans took control of more and more processes,
“which in turn led to a lack of Afghan mission and logistics ownership.”
It would have been better to spend far less money in Afghanistan but in a way that
empowered local leaders. Instead, we spent more than a trillion dollars on a war that
ended disastrously. Does it matter that we had a special inspector general perfectly
documenting the disaster?
Ukraine is a different place, of course. U.S. boots aren’t on the ground there - yet.
Pallets of cash aren’t being delivered to military leaders and politicians, as far as we
can tell. Corruption scandals seem to involve Ukrainian funds, not U.S. money. But
the lessons of Afghanistan are not lost on Ukrainians. Last year an article in Foreign
Affairs by Tymofii Brik, the rector of the Kyiv School of Economics, and Jennifer
Brick Murtazashvili of the University of Pittsburgh argued that donor countries
should work with local Ukrainian government entities to rebuild the country instead
of using “vast armies” of foreign contractors and nongovernmental organizations.
Such methods “undermine local governance institutions, not just by sweeping up
the best talent from them but by giving foreigners a greater say in what happens in
communities than the people who live there,” they wrote. When the war in Ukraine
finally ends, the money to rebuild the country will most likely dwarf anything
we’ve seen in our lifetime. That’s when the real feeding frenzy will begin.
Ukrainian institutions and watchdogs had better be ready.
NYT4. NO JURORS SEATED ON FIRST DAY OF MENENDEZ
CORRUPTION TRIAL
By Tracey Tully and Maia Coleman, May 13, 2024
Senator Robert Menendez is charged with accepting hundreds of thousands of
dollars in cash and gold bars in exchange for political favors at home and
abroad.
Jury selection began on Monday in the federal corruption trial of Senator Robert
Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, who is charged with accepting hundreds of
thousands of dollars in cash and gold bars in exchange for political favors at home
and abroad.
By the end of the day, no jurors had been selected for the trial, which is taking place
in Manhattan and is likely to last until about the Fourth of July.
Mr. Menendez has represented New Jersey in Congress for three decades, but the
corruption case was brought by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.
The jurors who will be asked to weigh the evidence against him and two New
Jersey businessmen, Fred Daibes and Wael Hana, will be from Manhattan, the
Bronx or several counties north of New York City.
All three men have pleaded not guilty.
At 7:30 a.m., reporters and prospective jurors carrying blue summons envelopes
lined up outside the Daniel Patrick Moynihan federal courthouse waiting for the
doors to open to the public.
Inside the courthouse, just before 8:30 a.m., Mr. Menendez walked through
security, wearing a dark blue suit and striped red tie, his Senate pin visible on his
lapel. He greeted court officers with a smile as he passed through the metal detector.
Two hours later, he stood facing scores of prospective jurors as they filed into a
wood-paneled courtroom. He appeared relaxed as the proceeding continued, leaning
back in a chair with hands clasped either at his waist or near his chest.
Mr. Menendez, 70, and the two businessmen sat quietly talking with their lawyers
while the judge, Sidney H. Stein, spent most of the day, off the bench, questioning
prospective jurors who had said that they would be unable to serve for the duration
of the trial; roughly three dozen would-be jurors were dismissed after an initial
screening by the judge, and an additional 50 people were called into the room.
The questioning is likely to continue on Tuesday, perhaps pushing the lawyers’
opening statements to Wednesday.
Mr. Menendez has said that he expects to be exonerated and has left open the
possibility of running for re-election in November.
“I appreciate the jury’s sacrifice, their time and commitment,” Mr. Menendez said
after leaving the courtroom for the day.
He and his wife, Nadine Menendez, were charged in a September 2023 indictment
with being at the center of a bribery scheme that lasted for nearly five years.
Mr. Menendez, the former chairman of the influential Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, is accused of steering government aid and weapons to Egypt, helping
Mr. Hana’s company win a lucrative monopoly and meddling in criminal
investigations in New Jersey on behalf of his allies.
In return, prosecutors have said, the senator and his wife accepted a Mercedes-Benz
convertible, home mortgage payments, a low- or no-show job for Ms. Menendez,
cash and gold bars. Investigators who searched their home in Englewood Cliffs,
N.J., in June 2022 discovered much of the cash stashed in coat pockets, boots and a
safe.
Ms. Menendez, 57, will be tried separately, in July. Her lawyers have said that she
was recently diagnosed with a serious medical condition that will require surgery
and, possibly, follow-up treatment and a lengthy period of recovery. She did not
attend the first day of jury selection.
The jurors, seated eight to a row, wore a sea of colors and patterns - oranges and
greens, plaids and stripes - that contrasted sharply with the staid blue and black suits
of the defendants and their lawyers.
Judge Stein began by thanking them for their service, acknowledging the strain that
a lengthy trial, in the middle of the summer, might cause. He cited John Adams, the
second president of the United States who helped write the Declaration of
Independence and also worked as a lawyer.
“John Adams wrote that representative government and trial by jury are the heart
and lungs of liberty,” Judge Stein told the potential jurors. “I firmly believe that,
and if you are chosen to serve as a juror on this trial, you will be part of that more
than 250-year tradition.”
The trial is expected to last six or seven weeks, but could run longer.
“Trials in reality are not run the way they are on television,” Judge Stein said.
“Things cannot be foreseen exactly.”
A jury consultant, Justin Kelly, sat at the defense table with Mr. Menendez’s legal
team. His firm, DOAR, was paid $150,000 for legal services in March by Mr.
Menendez’s Senate campaign account, federal spending reports show.

This is the second time in seven years that Mr. Menendez has been on trial after
being charged with public corruption.
The first trial, in U.S. District Court in New Jersey, ended with a hung jury in
November 2017. A judge then dismissed several of the charges, and prosecutors
later dismissed the rest of the charges in January 2018.
NYT5. ZELENSKY CLEANS HOUSE IN CORRUPTION-PLAGUED
DEFENSE MINISTRY
By Matthew Mpoke Bigg and Andrew E. Kramer, Sept. 18, 2023
On the eve of a trip to the United States, Ukraine’s president is eager to
demonstrate that the billions of dollars Washington is spending to aid his
country is not being squandered.
Two weeks after replacing its defense minister, Ukraine dismissed all six of its
deputy ministers on Monday, deepening the housecleaning at a ministry that had
drawn criticism for corruption in procurement as the military budget ballooned
during the war.
The shake-up in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s wartime leadership team came as
he headed to the United States, keen to demonstrate to American officials and other
Western leaders that his government is not squandering — on either graft or
mismanagement — the tens of billions of dollars in aid they have sent to Ukraine.
Mr. Zelensky is scheduled to address the United Nations General Assembly in
person on Tuesday in New York, and later in the week to meet with President Biden
and members of Congress in Washington in his ongoing efforts to shore up support
for military aid. He is expected to argue that defending Europe’s borders from an
expansionist Russia in Ukraine serves Western interests in preventing a wider war
and the destabilization of the European Union.
In Ukraine’s fight to take back territory seized by the Russian invasion, the chain of
command for battlefield decisions runs directly from Mr. Zelensky to the military’s
uniformed general staff, largely bypassing the civilians at the defense ministry, so
the turnover is not expected to have an immediate effect on the course of the war.
The ministry’s role is primarily not in tactics but logistics - procurement, salaries
and benefits - where changes may not be felt right away.
Ukrainian anti-corruption groups said the dismissals, though not all of them from
positions related to procurement, sent a positive signal about oversight and a
crackdown on wartime profiteering.
Much of the Western aid to Ukraine has been in arms, gear and training - not cash -
supplied directly to the military, and there have been no documented instances of
diversions of weaponry. Ukraine’s allies have also supplied billions in financial aid,
helping shore up a depleted government and battered economy, but that money has
not gone to the defense ministry, whose budget is drawn from Ukrainian tax
revenues.
Even so, some U.S. critics of spending on Ukraine — notably a faction of
Republicans in Congress — have said that reports of corruption were a reason to
place stricter limits on military aid, and some members of NATO are nervous that
weapons could be illicitly rerouted from their intended purpose.
The decision to dismiss the deputies was made at a cabinet meeting, according to a
Ukrainian government statement posted on the Telegram messaging app on
Monday. The government did not give a reason for the move.
Mr. Zelensky and top aides have described turnover as seeking fresh leadership
after more than a year and a half of war. The Ukrainian military pushed Russian
forces back in three successful counteroffensives that reclaimed about half the
territory Russia seized in the full-scale invasion that began in February 2022. It is
now locked in a bloody, slow-motion fight in the country’s south intended to cut
Russian supply lines to the occupied Crimean Peninsula.
Earlier this month, Mr. Zelensky dismissed Oleksii Reznikov, the defense minister,
after a din of criticism from the Ukrainian news media and civil society groups
about inflated prices in contracts and financial mismanagement. At that time, Mr.
Zelensky, who named Rustem Umerov as the new minister, cited the need for “new
approaches” 18 months into the war.
Mr. Reznikov, who had won praise for his diplomatic efforts to coordinate a vast
flow of weaponry and ammunition into Ukraine, was not personally implicated.
Anti-corruption groups have, however, singled out lower-level officials for
mismanagement in military contracting, or for failing to tackle corruption on their
watch.
The deputy defense ministers removed on Monday were not the first to lose their
jobs during the war. In January, one was dismissed and arrested after reports of the
department paying drastically inflated prices for food for the military. Another was
replaced last year, and months later a Ukrainian news outlet released what it said
was police video of a search of the minister’s home, with officers pulling wads of
cash out of a sofa.
Last month, Mr. Zelensky fired all 24 chiefs of Ukraine’s regional military
recruitment offices, after the government acknowledged that dozens of recruitment
officers were under investigation for accepting bribes to mark eligible men as
exempt from service. And there have been waves of anti-corruption raids and
dismissals involving other parts of the government, as well.
Daria Kalenyuk, the executive director of the Kyiv-based Anticorruption Action
Center, said that Monday’s dismissals were a “positive step” that showed that Mr.
Zelensky recognized the problems in the ministry and was intent on finding
remedies.

“The ministry of defense is one of the least reformed ministries in our country, and
it is not able to cope with the challenges of the war,” she said in an interview. The
timing of the announcement, she added, sent a signal to Ukraine’s allies in
Washington ahead of Mr. Zelensky’s trip that his government was committed to
overhauling the military bureaucracy.
Along with the deputy ministers, Kostiantyn Vashchenko was also dismissed,
according to the government statement. He had served as the state secretary for
defense, which is a senior managerial position at the ministry. The statement did not
name any replacements.
The deputy defense ministers released from their posts on Monday included Hanna
Maliar, who has emerged in recent months as one of the most prominent
government communicators of the daily movement of Ukraine’s counteroffensive.
Hours before her dismissal was announced, Ms. Maliar continued to post updates on
Telegram about the war.
NYT6. F.B.I. SEARCHES HOMES OF FIRE DEPT. CHIEFS IN
CORRUPTION INVESTIGATION
By William K. Rashbaum and Michael Rothfeld, Feb. 15, 2024
New York investigators working with federal authorities also searched the
chiefs’ offices at the department’s headquarters as part of an inquiry into
whether they inappropriately accepted payments.
F.B.I. agents early Thursday searched the homes of two senior New York Fire
Department chiefs responsible for overseeing safety inspections on building
projects, people with knowledge of the matter said.
At the same time, city investigators searched and sealed off the chiefs’ offices at the
department’s headquarters in Brooklyn.
The coordinated searches of the men’s offices and their homes in Staten Island and
Harlem were carried out as part of a corruption investigation that was initially
focused on whether the chiefs had been paid nearly $100,000 each in a scheme to
help expedite or arrange building inspections, several of the people said. The
investigation began late last summer and was being conducted by the F.B.I., the
U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York and the New York City
Department of Investigation.
There was no indication that the searches were part of a broad federal corruption
investigation by the same agencies focused on Mayor Eric Adams and his 2021
campaign fund-raising. While a spokesman for the F.B.I. office in New York
confirmed that agents had “carried out law enforcement activities” at the addresses
where the chiefs live, he would not comment further. A spokesman for the U.S.
attorney’s office and a spokeswoman for the city’s investigations agency declined to
comment.
Neither of the chiefs, Brian E. Cordasco and Anthony M. Saccavino, has been
accused of wrongdoing.
The Fire Department said in a statement Thursday morning that its commissioner,
Laura Kavanagh, had “proactively” placed both chiefs on modified duty.
“The F.D.N.Y.’s first priority is always keeping New Yorkers safe, and we expect
every member of the department to act appropriately,” the statement said, adding
that Ms. Kavanagh had immediately referred the allegations to the Department of
Investigation upon learning of them last year.
A spokesman for Mr. Adams said City Hall learned of the searches Thursday
morning from Fire Department officials and suggested that the actions were
unrelated to the broader fund-raising investigation.
“There is no indication of any direct connection to anyone at City Hall,” said the
spokesman, Charles Lutvak.
At Mr. Cordasco’s home in Staten Island on Thursday morning, a man standing
inside the doorway declined to comment and referred questions to his lawyer. The
man did not provide the lawyer’s name before closing the door. Mr. Saccavino, who
lives in Harlem, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, could not
immediately be reached for comment. It was not clear on Thursday whether any
lawyers were representing the men.
As of late last year, the investigation into the chiefs was examining, at least in part,
whether they had accepted the payments as part of an effort to help expedite or
influence fire inspections on building projects, some of the people said.
The payments of $97,000 apiece to the chiefs came from a recently retired
firefighter, and at least one was made to a limited liability company registered to
Mr. Cordasco’s home address, the people said. In 2023, the Fire Department paid
Mr. Saccavino $241,119 and Mr. Cordasco $235,462, according to city payroll
records compiled by the watchdog group SeeThroughNY.net.
It was unclear precisely what the payments were for and whether the retired
firefighter had made them on behalf of himself or someone else.
The investigation began at the end of the summer, one of the people said, when the
retired firefighter, Henry J. Santiago Jr., told another senior Fire Department chief
that he had made the payments to the two men. That official told Mr. Santiago, who
operates an event management company, that the official was duty bound to report
the payments to the Department of Investigation, and he did so.
The inquiry focused on the chiefs unfolded as the apparently separate corruption
investigation into Mr. Adams’s fund-raising was also moving forward, several of
the people said.
That broader inquiry has focused at least in part on whether the Turkish government
conspired with Mr. Adams’s campaign to funnel illegal foreign donations into its
coffers. In that investigation, the F.B.I. and prosecutors have examined whether Mr.
Adams, weeks before his election in 2021, pressured Fire Department officials to
sign off on the Turkish government’s new high-rise consulate in Manhattan despite
safety concerns, people with knowledge of the matter have said. Mr. Adams has
said he did nothing improper, and he has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
A year ago, Commissioner Kavanagh promoted Mr. Saccavino and Mr. Cordasco to
run the Bureau of Fire Prevention. The bureau, which is tasked with overseeing fire
safety inspections of new and renovated buildings, was the same unit at the center
of the episode involving the Turkish Consulate.
The two men were brought in to replace chiefs who had been demoted by
Commissioner Kavanagh and who in turn, in a lawsuit they filed against the
commissioner alleging age discrimination, said they had been wrongly blamed for a
longstanding backlog in inspections.
Their suit, now pending in New York State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, claims that
Ms. Kavanagh retaliated against one of the chiefs, Joseph Jardin, for failing to
acquiesce to “corruption in favor of major real estate developers.” Ms. Kavanagh
demoted Mr. Jardin by two ranks and replaced him with Mr. Saccavino. She also
elevated Mr. Cordasco to serve as Mr. Saccavino’s deputy.
The lawsuit claims that a list of projects created under former Mayor Bill de Blasio
in an effort to cut red tape and fast-rack inspections to aide small businesses had
instead been used to help “friends” of City Hall under Mr. Adams, who promoted
Ms. Kavanagh to commissioner last year.
“These ‘friends’ were prominent and influential real estate developers,” the lawsuit
says.
It was unclear whether the payments made to Mr. Saccavino and Mr. Cordasco were
connected to a project that was a priority of City Hall.
Mr. Jardin’s lawyer, Jim Walden, has said his client was interviewed by F.B.I.
agents last spring about the Turkish Consulate project that Mr. Adams supported as
a mayoral candidate in the summer of 2021. He had recently won the Democratic
mayoral primary, all but assuring he would prevail in the November general
election.
Mr. Adams had contacted the fire commissioner at the time, Daniel Nigro, on behalf
of the consulate officials, who wanted the department to sign off on the consulate
project in time for a September 2021 visit by the Turkish president.
In their lawsuit, Mr. Jardin and other chiefs have also cited various other
disagreements with Ms. Kavanagh and have asked for reinstatement along with
damages.
Ms. Kavanagh and the city have argued that she was within her rights to select her
own leadership team after becoming commissioner, as her predecessors had done.
And she said in an interview with NBC News late last year that the list of priority
properties was not new or nefarious.
“That list has always been shared widely with a large number of people and has
always been about, you know, city interests - what does the city need opened,” she
said.