Stealing “according to procedures” and making the supervisory board guilty: Milovanov on Mindich and Energoatom case
29 December 19:42
Tymofiy Mylovanov, President of the Kyiv School of Economics, who resigned from the supervisory boards of Energoatom and Ukroboronprom in November, said that the government does not allow supervisory boards to work independently, and then looks for the “extreme” and politicizes the assessment of their effectiveness. He said this on the air of the YouTube channel "Komersant Ukrainian".
Milovanov said that during his tenure at Ukroboronprom, he managed to promote the corporatization of enterprises, moving them from the “state-owned” format to more modern management models, which proved to be important in wartime. At the same time, he said, it was not possible to change the management culture to the level of the private sector, including defense-tech.
“What we failed to do is, let’s say, to transfer the culture to the one we see in the private sector, in defense-tech. The Soviet culture is not everywhere, but it is still generally somewhere inside state-owned enterprises,” he said.
Explaining the reasons for his resignation from the Supervisory Board of Energoatom, Tymofiy Mylovanov said that after the launch of internal control mechanisms, the company found itself in the center of a public scandal, but the responsibility for it, in his opinion, was shifted to the Supervisory Board.
“Energoatom is a company that has been corrupt for 20 years. They created a supervisory board. This supervisory board, in my opinion, has been slow, but it has begun to create internal control mechanisms in the first 8 months of its full-fledged work. And a scandal arose. A public scandal. And this public scandal, in my opinion, had to be responded to quickly. But the Supervisory Board continued to move slowly, and that’s why I left. But the supervisory board is being blamed. Do you know what this is called? “Punishing the innocent and rewarding the innocent,” he said.
Milovanov also spoke about the reasons why corruption in state-owned companies remains invisible to auditors. According to him, the problem lies not only in schemes, but also in the management culture and personnel decisions.
“They steal according to procedures, but they steal. And for this purpose, either special companies that are essentially intelligence agencies and work using non-standard methods should be hired, or law enforcement agencies should work. But in order to prevent this from happening, we need a different culture of leadership. To do this, we need to dismiss the leadership and hire new ones,” he said.
Answering a question about the mechanism for evaluating the work of supervisory boards, Milovanov said that the state itself makes them incapable because it wants to maintain direct control over the work of enterprises.
“In order for the supervisory board to really work, it must have the right to say ‘no’ to the president, prime minister and minister. In our country, as soon as the supervisory board says so, whether it is Ukrzaliznytsia or Naftogaz, it will be dismissed, re-formed, there will be some pressure, and so on. The SBI will get involved somewhere, the SBU will get involved. There will be political pressure, some other pressure. This is not the way to go. If you want supervisory boards to work, they must be completely independent,” he said.
