Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych is building a new, massive mansion for himself atop a cliffside in southern Crimea formerly owned by the state, news website Ukrainska Pravda has reported.
According to a recent investigation by the
news website, major construction is underway on the Ayia Cape estate, the
progress of which can be seen in numerous photographs captured by Tetyana Chornovol,
a journalist who has investigated Yanukovych’s properties since 2010.
The president’s spokesperson Darka Chepak
did not respond to the Kyiv Post’s request for comment on the topic.
The land atop which the new house is being
built was home to a sanatorium for employees of a state-owned road repair
company prior to summer 2007, reports show. However, in 2007, all the assets of
the sanatorium, including the 3.5 hectare park around it, were sold by the state
for just Hr 6.3 million, while Viktor Yanukovych was serving as prime
minister. The property went to little known Crimean company Arktur-Krym, itself
owned by Ukrkyivresurs.
Journalists have tied Ukrkyivresurs to the
president and his family. For instance, Ukrkyivresurs owns the so-called Tea
House in the town of Crimean town of Massandra often used by the president. The
company also legally employs workers of Yanukovych’s Mezhyhirya mansion north
of Kyiv and owns helicopters and a plane used by the president. The firm also
supplied construction material and furniture for Mezhyhirya. Moreover, Ukrkyivresurs
is registered in a building in the town of Brovary that is owned by Andriy
Kravets, a presidential administration worker.
Former head of Ukrkyivresurs Mykhailo
Dobnev was also the head of Vesprom company, which owns the yacht used by the
president’s elder son, billionaire businessman Oleksandr.
Later in 2007, after Yanukovych was
replaced as prime minister, the Crimea prosecutor launched an investigation
into an allegedly illegal alienation of the property. The prosecutor suspected
the price paid for the property was much lower than the market price. However,
the investigation never went any further and Arktur Krym sold the property to
Nord in 2007.
Chornovol says this was a simple reshuffle,
as the two companies shared one director.
Chornovil has disclosed numerous documents
to support her claims. Some of them are court rulings from the official court
database. Others are documents from the database of Ukraine’s State Tax
Ministry, which are public information as well. She says the president never
commented on her investigations and law enforcement never acted following the
disclosure of the documents.
“The only reaction was when I wrote about
how the cannons from a local museum in Crimea were stolen in order to be placed
in the mansion. Soon the cannons returned to the museum,” Chornovol says.
This is not the first time that Yanukovych
has been accused of an illegal land grab.
Critics have accused Yanukovych for years
of illegally obtaining the Mezhyhirya estate that stretches over 140 hectares
of land north of Kyiv. They maintain it was enabled through a series of opaque transactions
conducted by various state officials, including Yanukovych himself.
In 2003, Yanukovych’s Donetsk-based
charity fund Vidrodzhennya Ukrainy (Revival of Ukraine) rented the Mezhyhirya house
and the land around it. According to Ukrainska Pravda, Yanukovych paid a much
lower rent than the market would suggest – Hr 107,000 annually, or less than
$2,000 monthly for the entire 140 hectare plot. In 2005, when the now
imprisoned Yulia Tymoshenko was prime minister, a court cancelled the rental
agreement.
But after Yanukovych took over the prime
minister’s office for the second time in 2006, another court reversed the
previous legal decision and the estate went back to Yanukovych.
In 2007, Mezhyhirya was put up for sale
with no competitive bidding, which is required by law in such cases. It was
snapped up by the Donetsk-based company Metinvest Trade, which quickly sold it
to another company, Tantalit.
Due to the nation’s moratorium on land
sales, Tantalit rented most of the estate’s land from the Vyshhorod District
Administration. Ukrainska Pravda, citing the rental agreement, reported that
the entire fee was just Hr 626,645 per year – or just Hr 4 per acre – extremely
low for land near Kyiv.
“Yanukovych was renting the land plot of
1.76 hectares before 2010… I have learned that he is not renting but owning a
land plot of 1.76 hectares from his tax declaration for 2010. So in the summer
of 2011 I asked (the) Vyshhorod District Administration for information about
the price at which they sold this land plot to Yanukovych,” Serhiy Leshchenko, deputy editor of Ukrainska Pravda, who has been investigating Mezhyhirya, explains
in his blog.
However, his information request was turned
down. He subsequently sued the administration to gain access to the
information, has since lost three lawsuits in Ukraine and now took the case to
the European Court of Human Rights.
Yanukovych has previously denied any
involvement in the companies which own Mezhyhirya and claimed he only rents the
estate.
Kyiv Post staff writer Svitlana Tuchynska
can be reached at [email protected].
