The State Architectural and Building Inspectorate, a notoriously corrupt body responsible for issuing building permits, has officially ceased to exist as of Sept. 15.
The closure was announced in a Facebook post by Communities and Territorial Development Minister Oleksiy Chernyshov.
“The toxic and corrupt work of SABI drew thousands of complaints, therefore its liquidation was a necessary step,” he wrote.
The inspectorate’s closure had been planned for over 18 months: In March 2020, President Volodymyr Zelensky called the organization a “corrupt tick,” referring to the blood-sucking parasitic insect native to Ukraine’s forests. Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal called the inspectorate the “root of corruption.”
Earlier, in January 2020, ex-Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk estimated the grey market of issuing building permits at Hr 100 million ($3.7 million) per year.
In the last fortnight of its existence, the inspectorate issued over 400 construction permits, according to a Facebook post by urban planning expert Heorgiy Mohylnyi.
Over the preceding eight months, the inspectorate granted 1,621 permissions.
“The last 14 days before liquidation are equal to two months of regular work,” Mohylnyi wrote on Sept. 14.
According to the government’s decision, every employee of the 198-member staff of the inspectorate has been fired.
The inspectorate will be replaced by the newly formed State Inspection of Architecture and Urban Planning, which Chernyshov insisted would have a totally different structure and team, and will be far more transparent and digitized than its predecessor. Not a single employee of the liquidated inspectorate has been hired by the new agency, according to Chernyshov.
