There is an opportunity to reboot the ARMA, we just need to work – acting head of the agency Yaroslava Maksymenko

Interview with Yaroslava Maksymenko, Acting Head of the National Agency for the Detection, Tracing and Management of Assets Obtained from Corruption and Other Crimes (ARMA), to the Interfax-Ukraine agency

Authors: Mariia Boltryk, Dmytro Koshovyy

Last year, a law on the reform of ARMA was adopted. What did this mean for you in 2025, what have you already managed to accomplish, what has not yet been completed, and what needs to be done this year?

The reform of ARMA is aimed at rebooting the agency’s system, the system of management of seized assets.

In fact, this is a 100% reboot of the institution, aimed at streamlining procedures and ensuring transparency and openness of its activities. The reform covers a wide range of changes - these are not cosmetic adjustments, but large-scale regulatory and legal acts that form a fundamentally new architecture and logic of seized asset management. Different rules and different procedures are being established, the system is being freed from the subjective approach that existed before, and international cooperation is being strengthened, which will contribute to restoring trust in the institution. A separate important area of the reform is the creation and modernization of the register of seized assets. This involves not only systematic software work and database updates, but also the development of a full-fledged modern software product. We must develop a new ProZorro module, adapted to the new architecture introduced by the reform, which will provide separate algorithms for simple and complex assets.

Within six months, we had to identify more than 100,000 assets, build new processes in line with the reform, and effectively rebuild the institution’s management model. And all