The Asset Recovery and Management Agency (ARMA) has published its report for 2018. The head of the agency, Anton Yanchuk, personally presented the results of their first year of activities to the EU Anti-Corruption Initiative in Ukraine (EUACI)and other international donors.
The full report is available on the ARMA website.
2018 was the ARMA’s first year as a fully functioning state institution. Anton Yanchuk said the agency faces many challenges ahead, but it has already shown that its team can fulfill its functions effectively and provide society with real results. This is evidenced by the more than UAH 9 million that the agency returned to the state budget from its management of seized property.
According to the annual report, in 2018 ARMA received 1064 requests from law enforcement agencies for finding and tracing assets within criminal proceedings and 100% of them were processed. The agency now has a portfolio of close to 300 asset items that were seized and transferred to ARMA by the courts: cash and cashless funds, cars, agricultural equipment, residential and commercial real estate, and even two thermal power plants.
In 2018, with the support of the EU Anti-Corruption Initiative, ARMA experts took part in many workshops and specialized trainings in Ukraine and abroad, and also established cooperation with organizations such as the Camden Assets Recovery Interagency Network (CARIN), Europol, and the Balkan Asset Management Inter-Agency Network (BAMIN) to share specialized knowledge and experience.
EUACI also helped to organize ARMA’s first public event – the “FORMA” forum – and contributed to the development and publication of the manual “Guidelines for the Management of Seized Property”, which contains an analysis of court practice regarding seized assets, as well as a number of practical cases from 10 world jurisdictions that are useful for private business, law enforcement and other bodies.
ARMA is a state anti-corruption body with the unique function of finding and managing assets seized in anti-corruption and criminal proceedings. The formation of the agency began in 2016 and in 2017 the staff of the newly created body began their work.
