At his March 1 news conference, President Viktor Yanukovych said he once lived for many years in a village hut. But those days are long gone.
Recent
satellite photos available on Google Maps show that in 2012 Yanukovych
completed the construction on the former state residence that critics say he
privatized under shady terms. The multimillion-dollar estate known as Mezhyhirya
now boasts a golf field, horse club, helipad, a huge garage and hangar for
yachts.
The photos
dated September 2012 show that most of the construction works on the 140
hectares of the residence, located on the banks of the Dnipro River near
Vyshhorod north of Kyiv, have been finished.
The
previous photos dated August 2011 showed that many objects were hard to
identify as they were under construction.
Serhiy Leshchenko, a top journalist for Ukrainska Pravda website, has investigated Mezhyhirya for years.
Yanukovych
welcomed in June 2011 a group of loyal journalists to Mezhyhirya, where he
showed only a tiny part of the mansion as his property, claiming all the other
territory had other unnamed owners.
Leshchenko filed
a case with the European Court for Human Rights to demand the release of public
information on the luxurious estate and the way it became private property. Leshchenko
estimated the house along with a nearby sports complex and sauna alone to be worth
Hr 1 billion (about $125 million).
In his
investigations, Leshchenko described a complex ownership structure of
Mezhyhirya via a network of international holding companies that comes back to
a firm called Tantalit, run by Pavlo Lytovchenko, a lawyer close to the
Yanukovych family.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be
reached at [email protected]
