Lviv city authorities had an illegal high-rise apartment building torn down on April 25. They took the unusual step – understood to be the first ever instance of such a demolition in all of Ukraine – due to the development having exceeded its construction permissions.
The development was located in a prime and well-connected part of Lviv, which is the largest city in western Ukraine, located 540 kilometers southwest of Kyiv and home to about 720,000 people.
City council officials in Lviv sued the owner of the development and after a protracted, years-long process in local courts, officials secured legal victories in all instances, winning the right to have the development removed.
According to officials, the housing complex was built on a land plot designated for single-family houses and the construction permits were formulated respectively. Instead, developers planned and erected a seven-storied development containing 42 separate apartments.
The block was built by Lider Monolit LLC and is registered at the same address. That company currently belongs to Maherram Mahammed Ohly Novruzov, according to the Opendatabot portal, an aggregator of public information.
As reported by Lvivsky portal, a regional news and information website, prior to April 4 this year the company was owned by Bohdan Kopytko, who also owns Lviv Ice Factory LIMO.
The Kyiv Post could not reach Novruzov or Kopytko.
Before Kopytko, the company’s owners were Nazym Jamaladdin Hazanfarov and Maherram Mahammed Ohly Novruzov, as reported by the Pro Zahid news website.
In 2016, Kopytko survived an attack on his company’s Mercedes SUV, which was first bombed and then shot at nearby Lviv, according to reports by the Lviv-based Zaxid.net news portal.
Mayor of Lviv Andriy Sodovyi commented on the demolition on his Facebook page, saying: “The state exists where there is respect to law. We will demolish it (the building) to ground level by the end of the month (April 2019). From now on each construction company in Lviv must know that, if it is building anything illegally, the same fate will be awaiting you as that of the owners of this building.”
The Lviv city council has presented the event as historic, saying that it is the first time in Ukraine that city authorities have managed to demolish an illegally-constructed building of such size.
“In Lviv, for the first time in Ukraine, a seven-story illegally built house was demolished. There are no precedents for demolishing an apartment house of this size, built without documents,” the city council said in a statement, as reported by the Interfax news service on May 2.
Against this background, the experience of Kyiv seems somewhat different.
In the capital of Ukraine, city authorities have managed to bring allegedly illegal construction projects to a halt, but so far have not had any buildings demolished. At the beginning of 2019, there were 134 illegal construction and reconstruction projects in Kyiv, reported the Nashi Groshi investigative journalism network with reference to the public registry of city construction conditions, Kyiv city development plan, and Kyiv city cadaster.
City authorities in Lviv seem serious about their intention to bring newly-constructed buildings in line with construction permissions. On May 2, the city council published a notice on its website saying that violations were found in a new building located at Lemkivska St., 9a.
Moreover, the city authorities have published a list of construction sites at which they discourage people from buying real estate.
