Ukraine’s newly appointed defense minister, Yevhen Khmara, moved to crack down on corrupt army contracting practices like sweetheart no-bid deals, kickbacks and price-fixing by hiring the country’s leading digital due diligence firm to out fly-by-night contractors, a ministry statement made public on Monday said. A professional special operations officer with deep experience in behind-the-lines missions, Khmara took on the defense ministry’s top job on July 20, replacing Mykhailo Fedorov, a former civilian IT professional popular in Ukraine for digitizing most state services and jump-starting wartime drone production.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. Public demonstrations against Fedorov’s ouster have taken place in the capital, Kyiv, almost daily since then, with most protesters saying he was ousted to protect corrupt army contracting and demanding his reinstatement. A Monday memorandum of cooperation was signed by Deputy Minister of Defense Mstyslav Banik and Danylo Hloba, the deputy legal director of the digital corporate audit company YouControl, appeared calculated to defuse those protests and to carry on the Fedorov-era strategy of using IT and artificial intelligence to root out inflated pricing and graft seen in Ukrainian military contracting in the past. Hloba, in a statement, said that a company wishing to bid on a government contract, as a precondition for submitting the bid, will be required to submit evidence that it is capable of delivering the goods or services purchased at the price and terms agreed with the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU).