An unusual lot went under the hammer at an online auction on June 3 in Ukraine — an abandoned former state prison in Lviv.
The 39,800-square-meter prison, located on 32 acres of land, was sold for $13.6 million. The sale inaugurated the country’s ‘Big Sale of Prisons’ program announced by Justice Minister Denis Malyuska last August.
The original price of the prison, which shut down in 2018 because of extremely poor conditions, was $4.8 million, but due to competition between seven bidders, the price skyrocketed.
“The price increased during the auction almost threefold,” wrote Malyuska on Facebook. “It sold like a hot cake.”
The winner — Lviv-based architectural company Development Engineering Service.
According to YouControl, an organization that monitors business data and corruption, the company was founded in 2015 and is owned by the local businessman Taras Zubyk, who also has few other construction companies and heads the Lviv Project Institute.
Two previous auctions this spring for the sale of another empty prison just three kilometers north of Kyiv were unsuccessful — the starting price of $4 million turned off potential buyers.
Overall, the Ministry plans to sell around one third of over 100 prisons across the state, four of them in 2021.
Chief Architect of Lviv Anton Kolomeytsev plans that a quarter of the area of the former prison in Lviv will be used for housing and the rest for public space.
“There will be offices, a large sports complex, public gardens, a school with 18 classrooms and a kindergarten large enough for 150 children,” said Kolomeytsev to Tvoemisto.tv on May 21.
The revenue from the sale of prisons, including the one in Lviv, will be divided into two parts — 30% will go to the state budget, and the rest will be spent on repairs in functioning prisons.
According to Malyuska, the ‘Big Prison Sale’ will be a source of funding for the ‘Big Prison Construction’ in Ukraine.
“Instead of abandoned and ruined trash we will get new prisons that meet European standards that aren’t a disgrace to the state,” the minister said.
