Throughout the summer, Yuriy Lutsenko ran on a campaign in conjunction with Our Ukraine of bringing a new mayor to Kyiv. Subsequently, Yulia Tymoshenko ran her campaign on reducing corruption in the government.
It is surprising and shocking that neither of them, nor President Viktor Yushchenko, who ran for president on a “clean hands” platform, and is the titular head of Our Ukraine, have found it necessary to comment on the massive “land grab” undertaken by the Kyiv City Council, with Oles Dovhiy, the deputy mayor to Kyiv Mayor Leonid Chernovetskiy, chairing the land grab session.
Moreover, the land grab, unprecedented in terms of its size, was made possible thanks to the participation of the Our Ukraine faction in the Kyiv City Council, which voted for the distribution of the land parcels together with the bloc of Leonid Chernovetskiy.
In case anyone missed the news, last Monday, Oct. 1, as Ukraine was waiting for election results, Dovhiy held a snap session of the Kyiv City Council, which only members of his bloc and Our Ukraine attended. In five hours, the Kyiv City Council voted on more than 400 separate acts, the result of which was the transfer of up to 3,000 hectares of land to individuals and companies.
The Party of Regions, Tymoshenko’s Byut, the Communists and the bloc of Vitaliy Klitschko did not vote on these acts.
According to initial estimates made by Byut member Tatiana Melykhova, the value of the distributed, or granted, land was $200 million. Later more accurate estimates show that the total value of the land is worth billions of dollars.
In many ways, the Kyiv land grab case is similar to the infamous Krivozhstal privatization, which occurred in 2004, just before the presidential election. The party in power, fearing it might lose the reins of control, rushed through a bill allowing it to take control of assets worth billions of dollars for a minimal cost.
In the case of Krivozhstal, the rules of the privatization excluded foreign bidders and allowed
Viktor Pinchuk and Rinat Akhmetov to buy the plant for $800 million. And all of this was done with lightning speed. In just a month-and-a-half, parliament gave the green light for the privatization of the industrial giant, a tender was announced, and it was sold, with no other variants possible.
Only due to the political courage of Yulia Tymoshenko, who pushed for a fair and free auction, did we learn the fair value of the plant: $4.8 billion, which Indian billionaire Lakshmi Mittal gladly paid into Ukraine’s budget.
In the case of the Kyiv City Council, Chernovetskiy and Our Ukraine were even faster in granting land for long-term leases and privatization to unknown persons and companies for unknown prices. And while information is not forthcoming, it has already become clear that at least some of the companies have been connected to political allies of President Yushchenko.
At the same time, Lutsenko not only promised, but guaranteed a new mayor for Kyiv. Yet, even he didn’t say a word in answer to what his compatriots in Our Ukraine gladly took part in, robbing nearly 4 percent of Kyiv territory – a somewhat unusual, if not strange silence.
And here’s another example. On the night of the election, after the voting was over, Yulia Tymoshenko addressed an audience of foreign diplomats and businessmen in the Hyatt hotel to give her victory speech. She stated that Ukraine was open for business and that she would put an end to corruption. Having made the statement, it is all the more shocking that she said not a word about the multi-billion-dollar robbery that took place the very next day.
All of this is very similar to Krivorizhstal and the time of its first sale: A rigged political process that resulted in granting political insiders a gift worth several billion dollars. Except this time, it was not President Leonid Kuchma allowing Akhmetov and Pinchuk to walk away with a steel plant at a savings of $4 billion, but President Yushchenko, his colleague Lutsenko, and the fighter for fairness Tymoshenko. All of them sat quietly by while the members of the Chernovetskiy bloc and Our Ukraine gave land plots worth several times more than the city budget.
It is clear that currently major political forces are more concerned with the so-called Coalition Olympics. The question of forming a new government is the most important of all challenges facing the winners of this last parliamentary race. Clearly, that’s what those, who decided to give away the capital’s land, were counting on. It was precisely on Oct. 1, when the country was absorbed in counting up the votes that parties won during the elections of the preceding day, that the Kyiv City Council held its session.
It’s frightening to think that when the political giants finally divide their cabinet portfolios and then pick up their heads to look around, they will find that swifter political dwarfs have parceled the country into little pieces.
Are we to wait? Or do we begin to act today, Mr. President?
Jed Sunden is the publisher of the Kyiv Post.
