Palvo Bukin, former director general of Ukraine’s state-run defense production giant UkrOboronProm, failed to declare expensive real estate directly associated with him, according to investigative journalism project Bihus.Info.
In a new investigation published on Sept. 1, the project’s author Lesya Ivanova stated that the high-ranking official failed to mention his partner Olha Kurchinska who owns a 170-square-meter apartment in Kyiv worth $700,000.
According to the journalist, Kurchinska acquired it in 2015, when Bukin was a high-ranking director at one of UkrOboronProm’s subsidiary companies.
Oksana Levchenko, a former fiancee of the apartment’s seller, told journalists that Kurchinska and Bukin had rented the flat for nearly six months before the purchase and lived there as a family, raising two children.
“Kurchinska referred to Bukin as her partner who lives with her and called one of the kids their common son,” the journalist said.
Eventually, after a long dispute, Kurchinska and Bukin managed to persuade the owners to sell the apartment under the disguise of a gift agreement, instead of a usual an official purchase and sale contract, “as they had exhausted their limit of operations with real estate,” in the words of Levchenko.
Notably, Bukin’s declarations for the financial year of 2015 and for the years after have failed to mention both Kurchinska and the apartment, as well as the purchase deal.
Moreover, as far back as in November 2019, Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) said it had indicted the former UkrOboronProm director general over his failure to declare his incomes, his two apartments worth over Hr 3 million ($110,000), and a Range Rover car worth Hr 10 million ($360,000) owned by Kurchinska.
The NABU report did not reveal the indicted official’s name, although the Bihus.Info journalists are sure that it was Bukin.
“The only thing Bukin eventually declared was his son, who, according to (Bihus.Info and) the official inquiry, (was born by Kurchinska),” the journalists said.
The official refused to comment on the issue.
“The trial continues, the inquiry has been finished, the case has been submitted to the court, and hearings have been scheduled due in September,” the journalists said.
Between 2015 and 2018, Bukin served as a director of UkrSpecExport, a state-run company affiliated with UkrOboronProm that enjoyed exclusive rights to strike all arms deals abroad. In 2018, following a range of corruption scandals, Bukin replaced Roman Romanov, a long-time business partner of then-President Petro Poroshenko, as UkrOboronProm’s director general.
In an early interview with the Kyiv Post, Bukin vowed to carry out severe cutbacks among UkrOboronProm’s deeply ineffective top management and also to launch a relentless anti-corruption campaign.
Nonetheless, in early 2019, Bukin was exposed by Bihus.Info as being involved in a gargantuan fraud scheme to procure aircraft components from Russia with prices inflated sixfold.
According to the journalists, Bukin, as the UkrSpecExport director, even used to bring specialists from his company to repair his undeclared apartment’s electrical grid.
Just days before his dismissal from UkrOboronProm in August 2019, Bukin also reportedly approved of a new UkrSpecExport statute which effectively got the company out of UkrOboronProm’s formal control and created numerous new loopholes for corrupt schemes, according to Bihus.Info.
Bukin denied all accusations. Nonetheless, UkrOboronProm’s new head appointed by President Volodymyr Zelensky, Aivaras Abromavicius, canceled all of Bukin’s orders just days after his appointment.
