You're reading: Journalists, investigators pour through trove of Mezhyhirya documents Yanukovych left behind

When ex-President Viktor Yanukovych left his luxurious Mezhyhirya in a hurry on Feb. 22, he left a lot behind – including enough financial documents to keep criminal investigators and investigative journalists busy for months to come.

See also: Mezhyhirya becomes Ukraine’s newest public monument to corrupt excess

See also: A walking tour of Mezhyhirya, formerly Yanukovych’s opulent estate (PHOTOS, VIDEOS)

Now the
140-hectare complex north of Kyiv is public property once again, thanks to a
unanimous vote in parliament on Feb. 23.

Journalists who
arrived at the estate over the weekend found thousands of documents floating in
the Kyiv Sea or at its bottom near shore. Some of them were burned around the
edges in a failed attempt to destroy them. Others were still packed tightly in files
and folders. A diver recovered some 160 folders of invoices, contracts,
insurance policies, cash payment orders and the like.

Many of the seized
items shed light on how Yanukovych acquired and paid for Mezhyhirya through
shell companies that officially own Mezhyhirya.

Privatized in
2007 through a dubious scheme and occupied by the former president since 2002,
the estate is officially owned by Tantalit, a previously murky firm whose
activities are now better known thanks to the documents Yanukovych left behind.

They appear to add
up to a complex tale of corruption and greed – possibly enough to send many people
to prison if the allegations are properly investigated and proven in court.
Yanukovych, the beneficiary of the schemes, emerges as an ugly man who ran both
his home and his nation like a medieval fiefdom.

Yanukovych,
whose whereabouts re unknown, could not be reached for comment on these
findings.



Journalists and others study documents recovered from former President Viktor Yanukovych’s 140-hectare luxury Mezhyhirya complex. Yanukovych fled on Feb. 22, the same day parliament impeached him for dereliction of duties and gross human rights violations.

Journalists and
activists teamed up to dry, photograph and archive the papers in a boat hangar,
the closest building to the Dnipro River. Documents were spread around the
railings of a speedboat and plastered on the side of a beautiful yacht. The plans
are to release the database on a website for anyone to see and investigate.

But even the
first glimpses at the documents reveal that the riches of Mezhyhirya are possibly
the result of massive extortion and other crime.

Gena Rudenko, one
of the visiting citizens invited to tour the place by EuroMaidan, was astounded
by the riches. “Compared to our meagre salaries, this is awful,” he says. “But
it’s also beautiful.”

Visitors are still
not allowed to enter many buildings on the compound that took an enormous
fortune to build.

For example,
just one of the many reports recovered, shows that Tantalit’s 33-year-old
director Pavlo Litovchenko on June 17, 2006 planned to buy more than 1.5
million euros of furniture and wooden for one of the houses in Mezhyhirya.

In July 2007,
Tantalit was set to sign an agreement and buy a decoration for the outdoor
shooting range called “A Running Boar.” The amount of money that the company
was ready to pay was Hr 914,900, including an advance payment of nearly Hr
732,000.

In May 25, 2010,
more than Hr 9 million was set to be paid to a company to construct lawn
watering systems.

To see how their
former leader lived, thousands of people flocked to Mezhyhirya on Feb. 23. They
drove and walked. They brought babies and small dogs to see one of Ukraine’s
biggest secrets since Yanukovych took power in 2010. They created a traffic jam
that stretched almost 20 kilometers, all the way back to Kyiv.

The EuroMaidan
self-defense unit that guards the estate had to close access around 1 p.m.,
and make an appeal to people through the news media to refrain from visiting. But
those who were lucky to get earlier had lots of impressions to share.

“Now I
understand why those guys didn’t want to go to Europe,” one man told his friend,
referring to Yanukovych’s Nov. 21 rejection of a political and trade
association agreement with the European Union, a fateful decision that led to
his downfall three months later.

One document
seemed to record a transfer of $12 million in cash from a Yanukovych
representative to another person. There are records of large companies and at
least one bank that cash donations. Many cash transfers look like a
money-laundering operation.

Yanukovych kept
busy with more than just financial matters. He also was determined to identify
his critics. Several blacklists were discovered of people who were not allowed
to come anywhere near Mezhyhirya.

They included
FEMEN members, journalists and some activists of nationalist movements,
including Tetyana Chornovol, who was severely beaten on Dec. 25, an attack she
blamed on Yanukovych as retaliation for her investigations of his alleged
corruption. Yanukovych denied the charges and police dismissed the case as one
of road rage.

Yanukovych, who
rarely gave interviews or held press conferences, was very interested in
monitoring what was written about him. His AVK company evidently paid Hr 56
million on Dec. 10, 2010 to NC Bright, a company that monitored media coverage.
Media monitors, however, suspect that the transaction also involved money
laundering.

“This is a mad
price,” says Natalya Ligacheva, head of Telekritika media watchdog that
monitors media. A more realistic price is $20,000 monthly for the whole nation.

Some of the
recovered documents involved lavish construction at Sukholuchie, a hunting reserve
close to Mezhyhirya.

“A request to
finance according to Type 2 (Forma 2) of Hr 5 million to close off agreements
on Honka and Guest House #1 in Sukholuchya for the period of Nov. 12, 2010,”
one document reads  Forma 2 is a common
reference for cash payments in Ukraine.

Kyiv Post deputy chief editor Katya Gorchinskaya can
be reached at [email protected]