Deputies from the Leonid Chernovetsky Bloc joined colleagues from Our Ukraine in doling out 400 real estate properties estimated to be worth $200 million
Kyiv survived a shock on Monday, Oct. 1. During a Kyiv City Council session, deputies from the Leonid Chernovetsky Bloc joined colleagues from the Our Ukraine Bloc in doling out 400 real estate properties in the capital at lightning speed.
Opposition council deputies claim that land valued at nearly $200 million was essentially handed out for free as rental properties with privatization options to unknown recipients in violation of council procedural rules.
The events united council deputies from among the unlikely allies – the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc (Byut), the Party of Regions and the Vitaliy Klitschko Bloc.
The council session was chaired by Oles Dovhiy, Kyiv council secretary and deputy mayor to Chernovetsky.
Klitschko, a city council member and chair of the eponymous bloc, invited Korrespondent to analyze the results.
“The session lasted five hours and 609 decisions were passed,” Klitschko said. “Count how many decisions were made in one minute.”
It took city council members an average of 30 seconds to vote on each land plot.
“The session was like a conveyer,” Klitschko said.
The city council doled out up to 3,000 hectares of land, according to some estimates.
Basic math reveals that Kyiv gave out between 3 and 4 percent of its 836-square-kilometer total area in one working day.
Hypothetically, if the Kyiv government headed by Chernovetsky and Dovhiy continued selling land at that rate, it would take them a little over 100 hours to give away all of the land in the capital.
As one council member from Our Ukraine admitted, the Mongol-Tatar hordes never did as much damage to Kyiv.
Klitschko thinks that Kyiv officials attempted the radical measures because they see their own dismissal on the horizon and the country’s attention was focused on parliamentary elections.
Korrespondent conducted its own investigation into how the Kyiv city council members voted and who received Kyiv’s expensive land.
Dead-soul voting
Opposition deputies complained about how much land was given and the way in which it was done.
Council members from the Chernovetsky Bloc and Our Ukraine began voting even before the daily agenda was read.
Dovhiy barely opened his mouth when the deputies were already voting with their electronic voting cards, according to opposition council members.
One of Byut’s national leaders, Mykola Tomenko, expressed shock at the behavior of his allies.
“I would like to ask my colleague Yuriy Lutsenko [leader of the Our Ukraine-People’s Self-Defense bloc], who not only promised but guaranteed new and honest government in Kyiv, to stop the Kyiv faction of Our Ukraine that yesterday voted on 440 land matters,” Tomenko said.
Deputies from the Klitschko and Tymoshenko blocs decided not to make Dovhiy’s job any easier.
They stormed the session hall, tried blocking the podium and interfered with absentee voting taking place.
Although only 54 council deputies were present in the session hall, the voting screen revealed 63 and 67 votes, according to Klitschko.
“So-called dead souls were voting,” he said. “In other words, several council members were voting with cards of their absent colleagues, a violation of procedure. We managed to take a few cards away, but a few minutes later they had duplicates in their hands.”
Byut Kyiv council member Yuriy Dmytruk told Korrespondent that council member Andriy Artemenko from the Our Ukraine faction was outside of the country while his card was voting in favor of the doles.
Our Ukraine council members Volodymyr Prysiazhniuk and Ludmila Zakrevska were also absent from the session hall.
“Our faction in the Kyiv council is uncontrollable,” an Our Ukraine deputy told Korrespondent anonymously. “They do as they please.”
Alla Shlapak, co-chair of the Leonid Chernovestky Bloc, told Korrespondent that a quorum was in fact present in the session hall on Oct. 1.
“As for our faction, only council members who were present in the hall voted,” she said.
“For example, if Borys Serhiyevych [Komarnycky] got up from his seat, then I voted for him. That is okay because he trusts me. But he was present in the hall and procedural rules were not broken.”
Procedural violations
Klitschko claims that no member of his eponymous bloc saw any draft of city council proposals.
Every council member should have received copies of all the proposals on the daily voting agenda, according to procedural rules.
Furthermore, every issue on the agenda should have been presented by its sponsor and debated prior to voting, which did not happen on Oct. 1.
All of the decisions were passed illegally, accordingly.
“Rumors suggest that council members were motivated by six-figure sums to work so productively, but I do not have concrete proof,” Klitschko said.
“Between 2,000 and 3,000 hectares of land were stolen from Kyivans,” Klitschko said, adding that the Khotivsky state farm in Pushcha Vodytsia on the outskirts of Kyiv alone is 1,500 hectares.
Leaving the session hall, Byut council member Tetiana Melykhova said “properties worth $200 million were decided in there.”
It is unlikely that city coffers will see any of that money.
In 90 percent of the cases, the land was not sold, Klitschko said.
Rather, the plots were doled out for “temporary use” or rent.
“But the people who rent the land will have first rights to privatize it,” Klitschko said. “If the land is developed, then the issue of transferring title is only a matter of time. That’s Ukrainian law. That’s why we say that the land was stolen.”
The agenda items contained no information concerning the beneficiaries of the land transfers, said Dmytruk, a Byut deputy.
Those involved in preparing the agenda for the session could face criminal liability, he said.
“According to our findings, most of the buyers were front men – temporarily-registered students and people who do not even live in Kyiv,” Dmytruk said. Tomenko confirmed Dmytruk’s statements.
Shlapak told Korrespondent that she had drafted documents on all the land plots up for vote.
Concerning other council members who did not have copies, she said, “that’s their problem.” She said that council members claiming the opposite are lying.
“They are lying to the people, who are their responsibility,” said the Chernovetsky bloc representative.
When Korrespondent asked her exactly how much land was distributed, Shlapak said that “nobody conducted such calculations.”
“I cannot say exactly how much land was given out to which companies,” Klitschko said. “We have demanded that Kyiv city council provide that data, but we have not been successful.
Klitschko said that his bloc is calling for an extraordinary city council session to review all land decisions hastily passed.
He also asked President Viktor Yushchenko to rein in the Our Ukraine faction and file a complaint with the Prosecutor General’s Office on the Kyiv land grab. Byut, meanwhile, will challenge the legitimacy of the Oct. 1 session in the courts.
(Read the full-length original Russian-language version of this article in the latest issue of Korrespondent, No 38.)
