Kyiv Mayor Klitschko reportes mass dismissals of officials due to land corruption in the capital

Kyiv Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko has reacted to the corruption investigation into land grabbing in the capital. He reported mass layoffs in the Kyiv City State Administration (KCSA) and municipal enterprises.

Klitschkoʼs press service reported this.

They will be firing soon:

• Director of the Kyiv Institute of Land Relations Ihor Dolynskyi;
• Director of the Special Housing Fund Volodymyr Sharii;
• Director of the Financial Company "Zhytloinvest" Viktor Pohrebnyi;
• Deputy Director of the Department of Urban Planning and Architecture Valentyn Svyatyn;
• General Director of Kyivzelenbud Yuriy Bakhmat;
• First Deputy General Director of Kyivzelenbud Oleksiy Lukash;
• Deputy Head of the Capital Investment Department of the Municipal Association Oleksandr Hora.

Checks in various departments are ongoing — Klitschko says these are not the last dismissals.

Within the framework of this case, Klitschko has already dismissed the deputy head of the Kyiv City State Administration Petro Olenych, the deputy director of the "Spetszhytlofond" Yuriy Leonov, and the deputy head of "Kyivblahoustriy" Oleksiy Mushta. The deputy of the Kyiv City Council and the head of the land commission Mykhailo Terentyev wrote a statement of resignation from the position of director of the "Engineering Center" — the “UDAR” party faction is also recalling him from the deputies of the Kyiv City Council.

What preceded

On February 6, law enforcement officers exposed a criminal organization led by a former deputy of the Kyiv City Council. The investigation did not name him, but a number of media outlets claimed that he was Denys Komarnytskyi, the leader of the “Leonid Chernovetskyi Bloc” faction in the Kyiv City Council (KCC) from 2008 to 2010.

Other suspects include:

• Deputy Head of the Kyiv City State Administration;
• Chairman and member of KCC Standing Commission on Architecture, Urban Planning and Land Relations;
• current deputies of KCC;
• First Deputy and Deputy Director of Municipal Enterprises;
• four citizens whose positions are not reported by law enforcement agencies.

The defendants are suspected of seizing valuable capital land for development and fully influencing the local authoritiesʼ decisions on granting land rights. The scheme consisted of the defendants looking for promising land plots and registering ownership rights to non-existent houses allegedly on these territories for fake people. Then they submitted applications to the City Council to grant them ownership rights to land plots for servicing these structures — this way they avoided bidding.

According to the investigation, during 2023-2024, the defendants illegally removed land in the city center worth 11.6 million hryvnias from the property of the territorial community of Kyiv.

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