You're reading: Expensive helipad built in 2011 remains unused

KANIV, Cherkasy Oblast – An $11 million helipad near the gravesite of Ukrainian bard Taras Shevchenko illustrates the excesses and misguided government spending that took place to prepare for and co-host last summer’s Euro 2012 soccer championship.

Nineteen months after the ribbon-cutting ceremony, the so-called Kaniv helipad still stands virtually deserted, fenced in with barbed wire and watched by several dozen security cameras.  Government officials say the helipad – 143 kilometers from the nearest host city – was built to accommodate Euro 2012 diaspora fans wishing to pay homage to the iconic poet.

It was part of the at least $7.5 billion in taxpayer money spent for the 16 football games hosted by Ukraine, a giant outlay for a nation with a national budget of only about $50 billion and a gross domestic product of only about $180 billion.

Yet the Kyiv Post discovered the helipad is still not in use because it lacks the proper certificates and permits, leaving many to ask how the nation’s leaders determine priorities amid creaking Soviet-era infrastructure.

Officials initially said the helipad was supposed to service wealthy soccer fans of Ukrainian descent. “There is a strong Ukrainian diaspora in many countries,” Cherkasy Governor Serhiy Tulub said in 2011. “And they are not the poorest people…They will arrive in Boryspil (airport, where) a helicopter terminal will be created, then the helicopter will bring tourists and fly to Kaniv, to Shevchenko’s grave.”

But that never happened.

The state enterprise Liodovi Areny organized the public procurement for the helipad project, managed by the government-run National Agency for Euro 2012, in a non-competitive, single-bid procedure.

Procurement documents show this was done out of the “urgent need to commission the helipad… in June 2011” almost a year before the three week-long soccer event. It now appears that once all the money was spent, no one bothered to actually get the facility, completed in September 2011, up and running.

Ukraerorukh, the state air traffic management body, announced the heliport’s launch on March 11, eight months after Euro 2012. Its statement welcomed all interested parties, including helicopter owners to use the pad, claiming that it is operational. But when the Kyiv Post visited Kaniv, the local manager of the enterprise said that the helipad still lacked the proper certification and thus was unfit to service aircraft.

“There is hope that in a few months we will pass the certification,” Volodymyr Stracheus, the helipad’s director, told the Kyiv Post.

He explained that certificate applications have yet to be submitted.  And once they’re submitted, the State Aviation Service reviews the documents, which should take no longer than three months. Then an official commission must visit the site, and finally the helipad can receive certification for flights.

The helicopters that area residents had previously seen were, Stracheus said, simply training and test flights.

He still hopes the facility could be put to use since it was “included to the program for celebrating 200 years since Shevchenko’s birth” in 2014.

Neither the Infrastructure Ministry, nor Ukraine’s State Aviation Service, responded to Kyiv Post questions about the usage of Kaniv’s helipad.

Upgraded airports in four cities underused

In addition, a recent audit conducted by Ukraine’s Accounting Chamber has raised serious questions about the airport upgrades to boost capacity in Kyiv and Lviv, two of the nation’s four Euro 2012 co-host cities.

They along with the two refurbished airports in Kharkiv and Donetsk currently can’t boast of heavy traffic. The Accounting Chamber found inefficient spending. According to the report, $463 million was inefficiently spent to construct Terminal D in Boryspil Airport, which was partially financed with $212 million from the Japanese Bank for International Cooperation.

For example, government auditors found that an “unreasonable correction” in the construction plan for a new terminal added $325 million to Boryspil Airport’s debt obligations. The alleged abuse involved construction of the new Terminal D to increase capacity and build a new VIP zone. The agency noted that Terminal C’s capacity was enough to accommodate VIP and official delegations.

Since Euro 2012, passenger traffic has not exceeded 32 percent of the airport’s capacity. Meanwhile, transportation costs are increasing and the airport’s competitiveness is decreasing, the report says.

Airport officials think actual passenger traffic is in line with expectations.  “Construction of Boryspil Airport infrastructure meets future demands of airlines and passengers,” Boryspil’s press service wrote to the Kyiv Post.

The airport’s development plan says passenger traffic will reach 15 million by 2020, which is twice what it is now.

The agency also concluded that certain aspects of the airport’s upgrades, including costs, were changed without proper legal and financial justification. The auditors added the aviation industry’s actual needs weren’t included in the airport’s reconstruction plan. They noted that the Infrastructure Ministry failed to raise private funding for the project.

Former Infrastructure Minister Borys Kolesnikov, responsible for Euro 2012 preparations, has rejected all allegations.

“Who in the Accounting Chamber has the knowledge and the diploma, preferably international, in the aviation business? The Accounting Chamber of Ukraine does not have any licensed specialists with international aviation education and has no right to make such conclusions,” he said.

Kolesnikov blamed his predecessors for the problems. He said that construction of Terminal D started in 2008, when Yulia Tymoshenko was prime minister. According to him, the terminal was 60 percent complete by April 2010. Kolesnikov questioned why the previous head of the Accounting Chamber, Valentyn Symonenko, did not attempt to “prevent the ‘inefficient’ expenses” in 2008-2009.

Kolesnikov also mentioned that Terminal D was built with the airport’s funds and loans, not with state budget financing, failing to realize that Boryspil is a state-owned enterprise controlled by the infrastructure ministry.

Boryspil isn’t the only airport the Accounting Chamber criticized. The agency found passenger traffic reached only 8 percent of planned capacity – to have 7.3 million yearly visitors – in Lviv’s airport. The airport normally doesn’t have more than 20 daily flights.

And Kharkiv’s airport, which was expected to see peak capacity increase up to 5.6 million, was visited by 501,000 people last year, the airport’s website reported. Donetsk airport, with a planned capacity of 11 million, was visited by just a million travelers in 2012.

Kyiv Post staff writer Kateryna Kapliuk can be reached at [email protected].