Despite obstacles activists manage to submit an application to the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine for the land transaction of the Poroshenko family. The essence of the crime

On Monday, May 27 2019, eco-activists and animal rights activists of the capital came out to the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine. The protesters demanded to open criminal proceedings against the former president of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko and Acting Minister of Agrarian Policy Olha Trofymtseva. The latter is accused of animal cruelty as a result of her inactivity at her post — the mass death of horses due to the lack of feed at state-owned enterprises and the general unsatisfactory condition of the animals, which managed to survive. As for the former leader, there is an issue related to land.

According to the leader of the protesters, Volodymyr Bondar, the Houses of the recreation center of the Ukrainian Association of the Blind (hereinafter – UAB) “Ivushka” were transferred under the raider scheme to the Dukhnevych (Volodymyr, Liudmyla, Kateryna and Artem) and Monarch (Andrii, Yurii and Volodymyr) families. These people, according to numerous Ukrainian publications, make up the inner circle of ex-President Poroshenko.

We are talking about a complex of buildings at the address Kozin village, Lugovaya Street, 7. Back in 1998, UAB received these 4.3 hectares of land for the construction of a recreation center for the visually impaired. However, due to a lack of own funds, in the spring of 2010, the organization was forced to turn to a certain Soiuz-Invest LLC for assistance in construction with the involvement of investment funds. UAB and LLC were supposed to build up an area of 0.47 hectares with non-residential premises, some of which, by agreement of the parties, were to be transferred to Soiuz-Invest LLC in the future as compensation for funds invested in construction.

It is worth noting that the construction documents were then signed by the former director of the base Oleksandr Karminskii, who himself is blind. This circumstance became the basis for further consideration of the case in the courts.

However, as they say, dog barks, but the caravan goes on. By the decision of the executive committee of the Kozynska village council No. 10, starting from October 12, 2012, all newly built houses being the subject of a legal dispute between UAB and Soiuz-Invest receive a new address. That is, in fact, bypassing the law, without allocating a land plot in kind on the ground, it is issued de facto by assigning houses located on the border of this plot to an address other than that of the plot itself. And here begins the most interesting part of this story – previously a plot which was in the right of permanent use by UAB (Luhova Street, 6) bordered directly with the land privatized by Petro Oleksiiovych Poroshenko (Luhova Street, 4). However, after the adoption of this decision by the Kozynska village council, a new address appeared between these two plots – Luhova Street, 7 (marked in red on the map).

According to activists, the Dukhnevych and the Monarch families are mere elements in a complex scheme of the seizure and annexation of new lands to the exiting property of 3.5 hectares of the former President. “How can they make it?”–you may ask. The fact is that in the Land Code of Ukraine there is an Article 120, which is a perfect loophole for this situation. It defines the legal indissolubility of land and buildings or structures located on it. To put it simply: the owner of a building can acquire the ownership of the land on which the house is located through the court and actually use it.

That is, the final scheme looks as follows: the village council, bypassing the law (as this body does not deal with land management and have no authority to form land plots), assigns a new address to houses standing on the land plot. Next, information is entered under this address in the Unified Register of Real Estate Rights (of course, a personal notary is necessary for the procedure), and when there is a new address, the property is privatized by a range of individuals, according to the documents of the property owners at a completely different address than the plot on which they are actually located.

Of course, such individuals will eventually want to remove possible obstacles in the ownership and use of their property, gained exclusively through hard work, and file a lawsuit demanding to allocate them separate land plots from the existing one to ensure proper ownership and use of their own home. As a result, the existing land plot is divided into small pieces, which can later be bought, sold, exchanged or simply given to a neighbor, especially with the one you are on fairly good terms (which is the case, according to the activists).

Since there are numerous issues with the privatization of 3.5 hectares by Petro Oleksiiovych Poroshenko in the village of Kozyn from the point of view of the provisions of land and environmental legislation, the latter used this scheme, but on a smaller scale. According to the State Land Cadastre on the right of ownership and real rights to land plot, the land plot No. 3223155400:05:093:0004 belongs to Poroshenko, but separate real rights to it are established for Poroshenko Oleksii Petrovych – ex-President’s father, Poroshenko Yevhenia and Oleksandra Petrivna – ex-President’s daughters. That is, even if technically the new government still decides to take away from Petro Oleksiiovych 3.5 hectares of land obtained as a result of the privatization of the lands of the former recreation center of the Karl Marx factory, the land plot will “crumble” into three separate ones, to which legally Petro Oleksiiovych will no longer have anything to do, and the family will still keep the land, sticking to the so-called “law of energy conservation”.

Back to the to the protest action. After almost half an hour of chanting to the prosecutor’s office workers, no one came out to the activists. The entrance hall of the state body was closed for “lunch break”, according to the guards in camouflage.

It is noteworthy that the security officers did not even let put the application to the mailbox of incoming correspondence in the prosecutor’s office building, which does not require the involvement of any of the prosecutor’s office employees and does not imply distracting them from such a sacred process as having their meal. As they say, war is war, and lunch is on a schedule.

Citizens were extremely outraged by this fact, which lead to several attempts to break into the building and the guards calling a police squad. In 15 minutes, the police officers of the capital also came to the defense of the Yurii Lutsenko Citadel from the side of activists, and a verbal confrontation broke out.

In the end, after standing for about an hour under the scorching sun, now well-fed, the prosecutor’s office workers were able to accept the application papers of the protesters and promised to look into the situation. That was the end of it.

Dmitry Perov , founder of the NGO “Green Minute”