Ukraine’s second-largest tech company SoftServe announced on June 11 that it plans to build a high-tech campus at the site of a former state-owned prison in Lviv. The prison, located on 24 acres of land, was purchased for $14 million earlier in June by Development Engineering Service, an architectural firm that belongs to SoftServe.
In the next five to six years SoftServe wants to accrue over $50 million in funding to erect a “futuristic” campus in Lviv with a school, a kindergarten, offices, and sports facilities. It “will become a creative center of the city and a model for offices of the future,” said Oleg Denys, cofounder of SoftServe.
The purchase of the 39,800-square-meter prison, shut down in 2018 due to extremely poor conditions, is good news for Lviv and its citizens.
“Now the city’s whole district will get a new life,” said Dmytro Sennychenko, the head of State Property Fund of Ukraine. The campus will also create new jobs and bring money to the state budget, he added.
For years Ukraine poured millions of dollars annually into maintaining dilapidated prisons. If privatized, they could bring nearly $37 million to the state budget in 2021, Sennychenko said.
Last August, Justice Minister Denis Malyuska announced the ‘Big Sale of Prisons’ program. As part of the program, the Ministry wants to sell almost one-third of Ukraine’s 100 or so prisons within the next two years and use the money to build new ones with better conditions, less corruption and reduced maintenance costs.
According to Malyuska, the government will receive 30% of the investments, while the rest would be reinvested in the reconstruction of prisons.
The demand for shuttered prisons appears to be high. The original price of Lviv’s prison was $4.8 million, but due to competition between seven bidders, the price skyrocketed almost threefold, according to Malyuska.
Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi said that he is happy that SoftServe’s subsidiary won the auction because the company, which now employs nearly 10,000 techies across the world, could transform the abandoned district, located nearly 65 kilometers west of Lviv’s historic center Rynok Square.
By the end of the year, the privatization of former prison buildings could bring over $25 million to Lviv’s budget. In 2020, the city received nearly $5 million, while in 2019 — only $2.5 million.
To get the best out of the newly-purchased territory, SoftServe will work with international architectural bureaus and plan to begin construction next year. Lviv is an important city for the company, according to Denys.
“It is here, where SoftServe was born, where our European headquarters is located and a big part of our history belongs,” he said.
