The High Anti-Corruption Court (HACC) remanded in custody with bail of 50 million hryvnias a Kyiv City Council deputy suspected in a land grabbing case.
This was reported by the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutorʼs Office (SAP).
The suspect is a member of the Kyiv City Councilʼs (KСС) standing commission on architecture, urban planning, and land relations.
The first deputy head of the Special Housing Fund (he was set at 4.5 million hryvnias bail) and another person who helped with accounting (8 million bail) were also taken into custody.
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 from 2008 to 2010.
Among the other suspects:
- Deputy Head of the Kyiv City State Administration (KCSA);
- 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 land in the capital for development and fully influencing the local authoritiesʼ decisions on granting land rights. The scheme consisted in 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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