Media insiders are at a loss to explain how a tender last week for operating rights over a new Kyiv television channel went off with almost nobody knowing about it.
While the winner of the Nov. 20 tender for channel 40 in Kyiv has not yet been announced, speculation has arisen that the State Television and Radio Council, which administered the tender, predetermined the result. That would not surprise some industry insiders.
‘It happens all the time in television here that nobody hears about things,’ said Yury Labunsky, president of Ukrainian Association of Cable TV Operators. Labunsky emphasized that neither he nor any of his friends in the industry were aware of the tender until after it had been held.
The few who did know about the tender were given short notice. The competition was announced only in the beginning of November. This gave companies less than three weeks to prepare and submit a veritable stack of required documents, including a financial statement and a complete proposed programming menu.
State TV and Radio Council head Viktor Petrenko did little to suppress suspicion that the tender was merely a formality. Without giving any names, he openly admitted there was a ‘specific’ company interested in the channel, and that company would likely be chosen the winner of the tender.
Citing a speech given by Petrenko to the parliamentary council on freedom of speech, several local newspapers quoted Petrenko as saying that same company initiated the creation of channel 40. He said the company estimated the prospective cost of the project, researched potential frequencies and submitted all details to the TV and Radio Council.
‘Why allow someone else to get hold of the result of [the company’s] work?’ Petrenko asked of the parliament deputies in attendance at the meeting.
Petrenko’s words seemed to contradict fellow TV and Radio Council member Volodymry Horobtsov, who denied the results of the tender are being rigged. Horobtsov accused enemies of the TV and Radio Council of spreading that rumor.
‘I don’t remember a single case when a decision was made in advance,’ he said.
Horobtsov described his colleague Petrenko as a ‘real professional’ and said that most council members were capable of making reasonable guesses as to who might win the tender.
‘It’s like a judge going to a trial: he knows roughly what sentence might come out in a particular case,’ Horobtsov said.
Horobtsov declined to make any predictions himself. He also refused to identify any of the applicants in the tender, saying only that several companies were involved.
‘We would still accept documents if somebody brought them in today,’ he said on Tuesday, four days after the official Nov. 27 deadline for applications.
Meanwhile, speculation runs rampant as to the identity of the tender winner.
The Den newspaper suggested the winner would be Gravis, a private production company controlled by controversial parliament deputy and former presidential adviser Oleksandr Volkov.
A group of parliament deputies recently accused Volkov of corruption, abuse of power and hiding his profits from illegal business activities in foreign bank accounts.
