NABU: 71 lawmakers charged with corruption over past nine years, including 31 from current Parliament

Before NABU and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office were created in 2015, holding members of Parliament accountable for corruption was “more of an exception than the rule,” the agency noted. But that dynamic, it said, has changed.

Between 2016 and 2025, NABU charged 71 lawmakers — 42 of them between 2022 and 2025 alone.

The bureau emphasized that 31 of those lawmakers served in Ukraine’s current, ninth convocation of the Verkhovna Rada.

The most common corruption offenses, according to NABU, include:

• misappropriation or embezzlement of property;
• accepting undue benefits;
• abuse of power or official position;
• false asset declarations;
• illicit enrichment.

“NABU and SAPO consistently demonstrate that the law applies equally to everyone and that a parliamentary mandate does not grant immunity,” the statement read.

Law No. 12414 and its implications

On July 22, Ukraine’s parliament passed bill No. 12414 in full — a measure Transparency International had previously slammed as an attempt to strip the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) of their independence.

The bill, whose full text was obtained exclusively by Radio NV, amends a draft law changing Ukraine’s Criminal Code. The amendments were introduced by MP Maksym Buzhanskyi from the ruling Servant of the People party.

Among other provisions, the law gives the prosecutor general new powers to:

• remove cases from NABU and assign them to other investigative bodies;
• act as the de facto head of SAPO and delegate SAPO prosecutors’ authority to others;
• issue binding written orders to NABU detectives;
• unilaterally close investigations into top officials.

SAPO’s procedural autonomy would also be significantly weakened, as the law:

• strips SAPO prosecutors of the power to assign jurisdiction to NABU in exceptional cases;
• blocks the SAPO head from resolving jurisdictional disputes over NABU-led cases;
• removes the SAPO head’s authority to amend appellate or cassation filings submitted by SAPO prosecutors.

Guillaume Mercier, a representative of the European Commission, said the EU is concerned about Ukraine’s recent actions involving NABU and SAPO.

On the evening of July 22, protests broke out in Kyiv and several other cities — including Odesa, Lviv, Dnipro, and Ivano-Frankivsk — in opposition to the bill’s passage.

Later, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed the bill into law. In a video address published overnight on July 23, he insisted that NABU and SAPO would continue their work despite the new legislation. However, he said the country’s anti-corruption infrastructure must be “cleansed of Russian influence.”