Since March 18, residents of Kyiv have endured longer traffic jams than usual on Prospekt Pobedy – one of the city’s most important streets – due to disruptions caused by the reconstruction of the city’s Shulyavskiy Bridge.
Traffic is not the only concern, however. The tender for the project is raising eyebrows in the Anti-Monopoly Committee of Ukraine (AMCU). It has launched an official investigation into what may potentially be a corrupt collusion scheme between two companies.
The construction tender for the bridge was organized by city authorities in June 2018 and hosted on Prozorro, an open, online platform used by the Ukrainian government for public procurements.
However, soon after the tender ended and the winner was announced, Nashi Groshi, a television investigative journalism show, revealed on June 29 that only two out of four companies interested in the project were authorized to compete: Spetsbud-plus and the North-Ukrainian Construction Alliance, or NUCA.
Ultimately, NUCA won the Shulyavskiy Bridge reconstruction project, which was valued at Hr 600 million, or $22 million. The company belongs to Andriy Yakusevych.
Yakusevych also works as an assistant to Maxim Mikitas, who used to be president of state-owned construction corporation Ukrbud and currently sits in parliament as a member of the Volya Narody, or People’s Will, faction.
As it turns out, both companies that competed in the tender are part of Ukrbud. Despite the two different names, they appear to be, de facto, one entity.
Nashi Groshi alleges that NUCA would have received Hr 5 million ($180,000) worth of financial assistance with zero interest from Spetsbud-plus — a deal that extends until 2023.
According to Aleksey Khmelnitskyy, chairman of the Anti-Monopoly Committee, the two companies used the same IP address to report their taxes and the same physical address to file the applications they sent for various public tenders.
They also share the same bank, from which they received financial guarantees on the same day.
Both companies did not reply to multiple requests for comment from the Kyiv Post.
If the allegations are proven to be true, then Spetsbud-plus and NUCA will have violated the rules governing public tenders, which forbid companies competing for public projects from working together in order to suppress competition. The two companies could incur a fine of 10 percent of their income for the previous year, according to Khmelnitskyy.
Two other cases pertaining to the reconstruction of the Amosov National Institute of Cardiovascular Surgery (worth Hr 2.8 billion or $105 million) and the reconstruction of gymnasium number 59 (worth Hr 175 million or $6.5 million) also involve the two companies. The Anti-Monopoly Committee will investigate.
Igor Kossov contributed reporting to this story.
