A large-scale corruption scheme that had been operating for years has been uncovered in the capital.
This was revealed during the high-profile operation "Clean City". Recall that recently, by order of the head of the Kyiv City Military Administration Timur Tkachенко, a working group called "Transparency and Accountability" was established. Its goal is to ensure transparency in the use of community resources, compliance with anti-corruption legislation by the city authorities, as well as to prevent, detect, and resolve conflicts of interest.
The mission of the "Transparency and Accountability" group is to put an end to the "toilet" and other schemes through which Kyiv is losing valuable land and the city budget is missing out on millions of dollars.
Journalists from "Kashtan NEWS" examined numerous locations seized as a result of various illegal schemes and identified those involved. The latest episode of the YouTube project "In the Shadow of the Chestnut" discusses how business centers are replacing community parks, who is enabling land deals through their actions or inactions, and what to expect from the high-profile investigation by NABU and SAP.
Among those detained are Deputy Head of the Kyiv City State Administration Petro Olenych, Kyiv City Council member and head of the land commission Mykhailo Terentiev, and Kyiv City Council member and member of the permanent commission on architecture, urban planning, and land relations Olena Marchenko. Also detained were the deputy director of KP "Kyivblagoustriy", the first deputy head of KP "Spetszhytlofond", and an employee of "Spetszhytlofond". According to NABU and SAP, all of them were involved in the plundering of city land.
0 As reported during a briefing by the Director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, Semen Kryvonos, the corrupt schemes have been dubbed the "toilet scheme" because they began with the privatization of public toilets, for which land plots were then allocated. Subsequently, these could involve small architectural forms. In other words, by exploiting corrupt individuals, including state registrars of property rights and loopholes in legislation, they were effectively trading land plots. Developers and entrepreneurs, eager to seize a lucrative piece of expensive Kyiv land, along with officials, likely for personal gain, found legal loopholes that allow such transactions to occur.
1 "Mayor Vitali Klitschko is actually aware of everything that is happening in the city, and he knows when these legal violations occur. It’s hard to believe that a person who has been leading the city for 10 years, and whose team has been in charge for the same period, can express genuine childlike surprise every time by saying: 'God, I don’t know how there are corrupt officials in my team? That can’t be true.' Well, I find it amusing, but it's unfortunate that many Kyiv residents fall for this. They have this bright image of a boxing champion from their childhood. And they continue to believe in this bright image, even though it no longer corresponds to what was on the screens of our childhood," says Kyiv City Council member Ksenia Semenova.
2 "Hectares of valuable Kyiv land are being allocated for a non-existent building, which could have been sold at auction for hundreds of thousands of hryvnias or even millions. This money could have gone to the budget. Our community could have sent tens of thousands of strike drones to the front, but instead, land is being taken from the city for a pittance," asserts head of the KMVA Timur Tkachенко.
For more details, watch the new episode of the YouTube project "In the Shadow of the Chestnut" at this link