OREANDA-NEWS. July 12, 2010. Monitoring Group of the Istanbul Action Plan Anti-Corruption Network of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has completed the second round of study and assessment of the fight against corruption in Ukraine and in compliance with legislation, which was held during.

 That was announced at a briefing by the deputy Minister of the Cabinet of Ministers - the Government Plenipotentiary for anti-corruption policy Andriy Bohdan.

"In general, experts are satisfied by the cooperation" - Andriy Bohdan said and added that such an assessment reflects the openness of Ukrainian authorities, the willingness to cooperate with international organizations, to provide all the necessary internal documents and update existing procedures and to accept criticism.

Andrei Bogdan said that Ukraine is sufficient to improve actively its anti-corruption legislation, so in general, experts positively assess the situation in the country.

In turn, the Head of Department for problems of corruption of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine Office, National Coordinator of the Istanbul Action Plan Oksana Markeev noted that the monitoring group studying the changes that have occurred in Ukraine over the past four years (last time monitoring of the organisation was held in Ukraine 2006: "The Expert Group received a detailed picture of what happened during last years in Ukraine".

As noted by Oksana Markeev, according to preliminary estimates, experts noted some progress on anti-corruption policy. In particular, Ukraine has managed to fulfill one of the recommendations of the Istanbul Action Plan: to create an institute of the Government Plenipotentiary for the anti-corruption policies and the Bureau of the anti-corruption policies. "Thus, Ukraine has significantly improved its performance in the field of anti-corruption policy. This means we start to be at the political level more conscious of the anti-corruption process"- she said.

According to Oksana Markeev, experts note the progress in the field of public procurement: "From the chaos of previous years in the field of public procurement Ukraine will start to approach the transparent order. Political will to fight corruption in Ukraine showed also by the package of anti-corruption laws adopted which comes into force 1 of January 2011.

At the same time, the representative of the National Security Council reported that by preliminary conclusions of international experts, the situation has not changed much in law enforcement, especially prosecutors. Also very negative is the situation with political corruption: "An illustration of the lack of progress is the institution of immunity".

According to Oksana Markeev, one of the ways to improve the situation, besides improvements of national legislation, is to forge partnerships with nongovernmental organizations.

She reported that a preliminary report on the state of affairs in the fight against corruption in Ukraine the monitoring group is to unveil in October, and final conclusions will be approved in December, as monitoring will be carried out till the end of this year.