A court in the Odesa region has brought the case involving fraud in a sewer system reconstruction project to a close

The court partially dismissed the case regarding the reconstruction of the wastewater treatment plant in Vilkovo, which had been ongoing for nearly nine years. The defendants, who were charged with official forgery, were acquitted due to the expiration of the statute of limitations.

The Center for Public Investigations examined the details of the case.

The court considered the case, opened in 2017, regarding the reconstruction of the wastewater treatment facilities in Vilkovo. Former officials of the Odesa Regional State Administration, executives of a state-owned enterprise, and representatives of the general contractor stood trial.

According to the investigation, between 2015 and 2017, the participants in the scheme entered false information regarding the scope and cost of the work into the certificates of completion. Some of the work listed in the documents was either not fully completed or not performed at all.

One of the incidents involved the reconstruction of wastewater treatment facilities in Vilkovo, where, after the certificates were signed, more than 1.1 million hryvnias were transferred to the general contractor. According to the expert report, nearly 860,000 hryvnias of this amount corresponded to work that was not actually performed.

Another case involved the construction of an electronic monitoring network for the vacuum sewer system, costing over 10.5 million hryvnias. Investigators believed that due to the overstatement of the scope of work, the contract value was inflated by more than 634,000 hryvnias.

In November 2017, the Ecology Department of the Odesa Regional State Administration signed a contract with Polimerkonstruktsiya LTD LLC for additional work worth over 6.5 million hryvnias. At that time, the contractor was paid over 2.4 million hryvnias, of which over 1.1 million was for work that was not actually performed.

Among the defendants were the former director of the Odesa Regional State Administration’s Department of Ecology, Iryna Shatokhina; the former head of the state enterprise “Odesa United Directorate for the Construction of Water Management Facilities,” Heorhiy Buziyan; Lidia Galchuk, the company’s chief engineer at the time, as well as former executives of “Polimerkonstruktsiya LTD,” Volodymyr Chyrich and Oleksandr Aksyutin.

Lawyers for several of the defendants requested that the charges of official forgery be dismissed due to the expiration of the statute of limitations. The court agreed and acquitted them of criminal liability.

Also in July in Odesa, a city council official was suspected of misconduct during the restoration of a children’s center.

Анна Бальчінос