The 2,600-square kilometer exclusion zone around the site of the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear reactor disaster is an abandoned, post-apocalyptic landscape. And the lingering radiation in the forests and fields of the zone isn’t the only form of contamination there, critics say:
There’s also omnipresent corruption.
One sign of its presence is that the Cabinet on Sept. 23 fired Yury Antipov, the head of the State Agency for Managing the Exclusion Zone, on orders of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. The prime minister also asked the Interior Ministry to start a criminal investigation into the official.
Several officials of the zone have accused Antipov and his associates of graft and incompetence. The scandal also exposed corrupt schemes that have allegedly existed in the Chornobyl zone since its creation in 1986.
Antipov declined to comment on the corruption accusations, but in a written statement, said he quit voluntarily and was not fired.
He also claimed that he had told Yatsenyuk about “the disastrous situation” in the zone, as well as “pervasive corruption, security problems, a lack of (zone) border protection, and the need to immediately reform its management system.” He said that the Cabinet had not reacted to his complaints, and that is why he had decided to step down.
Some of the accusations against the agency’s management were made by Serhiy Parashin, an ex-chief of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant and currently head of the plant’s public council, in an open letter to President Petro Poroshenko dated Sept. 1.
Parashin wrote that the State Agency for Managing the Exclusion Zone was run by “people close to (Batkyvshchyna party leader Yulia) Tymoshenko.”
He claims that Antipov, who became head of the agency in May, was de facto appointed by Batkyvshchyna and that Artur Chechetkin, a businessman from Odesa and Tymoshenko’s son-in-law, plays a key role at the agency without occupying any official position.
Katerina Lebedeva, a spokeswoman for Batkyvshchyna, said that allegations that Chechetkin was involved in running the Chornobyl zone and that Antipov has something to do with the party were “nonsense.”
“For the first time an ignoramus who doesn’t know anything about Chornobyl’s problems and this international project’s reputation was appointed as head of the State Agency for Managing the Exclusion Zone,” Parashin wrote in his letter of complaint to Poroshenko. “People without official positions, responsibility, powers and professional qualifications are running (the agency) on his behalf.”
Yury Antipov, ex-head of the State Agency for Managing the Exclusion Zone.
Parashin and several officials of the Chornobyl zone argue that Antipov and his allies had been pressuring heads of state companies subordinate to the agency in an effort to discredit them and replace them with their own placeholders.
Parashin claimed that Antipov’s associates had started “removing people who don’t agree to pay tribute.”
Maxim Shaplyko, the head of the state firm that provides medications and clothing to employees of the Chornobyl zone, said in a Sept. 3 letter to Antipov that Volodymyr Neborsky, who presented himself as an aide to Antipov, had suggested that he should resign. In August Neborsky organized an audit of the company without warning it in order to “discredit the company’s management,” Shaplyko claimed.
And Oleksandr Hrebenyuk, the head of NTTs KPRV, a company that processes radioactive waste, was fired on trumped-up charges of not showing up for work, according to Yury Hnylytsky, the head of the Chornobyl management agency’s department responsible for the Chornobyl Power Plant.
Hrebenyuk refused to authorize an embezzlement scheme allegedly proposed by Antipov’s people, Hnylytsky told the Kyiv Post. The project envisaged allocating money for building a storage facility for nuclear waste returning from Russia, despite the fact that such a facility had already been built, he said.
Ihor Hramotkin, the chief of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, has also faced pressure, Hnylytsky and Parashin told the Kyiv Post. The Prosecutor General’s Office has started a criminal case against the plant in an effort to fire Hramotkin, they said.
Hnylytsky and Parashin said that the agency’s management were trying to appoint their people in order to cash in on the selection of subcontractors they are linked with. Hnyletsky said the agency’s management had already attempted to reach certain deals with such subcontractors.
Yatsenyuk said on Sept. 23 that a firm supplying food to French employees in the zone had been replaced by a shady outfit, and that the agency had suspended the licenses of some construction companies and replaced them with others.
Critics say that interference by the agency’s management in the work of companies in the Chornobyl zone was disrupting these firms’ operations, and that could cost the country dear.
Foreign companies may fine Ukraine 300,000 euros per day for disrupting the construction of the nuclear reactor’s shelter, Hnylytsky said. Parashin said that the government could lose hundreds of millions of euros as a result of the agency’s actions.
Another corrupt scheme covered up by the agency’s top officials in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is the illegal transportation of timber and metals out of the zone, Parashin and Hnylytsky said. Parashin said that it had also existed before Antipov.
Officials use fires as an excuse for chopping down timber and illegally selling it, Hnylytsky said. Fires also provide an opportunity for embezzling government funds, he added.
“A lot of people have an interest in a fire breaking out,” he said. “So they can allocate 500 liters of gasoline instead of 50 (for vehicles used by the zone’s firefighters).”
The problem with fires got so bad that Yatsenyuk even had to deploy National Guardsmen in the zone in August to take the situation under control.
Antipov himself admitted in his letter that “theft of timber, metal and construction materials” was a persistent problem in the zone.
Hnylytsky also described a dubious scheme in which the agency does certain work and then hires companies that pretend to perform the same work.
Critics say corruption schemes run deep at the agency and have existed since its creation.
In 2013 Orest Turkevych, an ally of disgraced former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, became a deputy chief of the agency.
He was also accused of corruption. “He was doing the same stuff as (Antipov’s people),” Parashin said.
In October, Turkevych became the agency’s acting chief. In April, he was fired under Ukraine’s lustration law, which disqualifies from holding state positions certain officials who were appointed under Yanukovuch’s regime.
Turkevych was not available for comment.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected]
