Housing and Communal Services Inspector in Mykolaiv Found Guilty of Bribery, but Not Punished

An employee of a department of Mykolaiv City Council was found guilty of bribery for signing certificates for non-existent works, but was released from punishment due to the statute of limitations. The court found that the official received money, but did not prove the fact of extortion.

This was reported by the Anti-Corruption Dimension with reference to the court verdict.

Oleksiy Baryshev, an inspector of the Housing and Communal Services Department, was found guilty of a corruption offense, but was released from punishment due to the expiration of the statute of limitations. It was a case of receiving a UAH 6,000 bribe for signing certificates for construction work that had not yet been completed.

According to the case file, in April 2020, Baryshev agreed with the contractor to sign the documents before the work was completed. The conversations were about a kickback in the amount of 1-3% of the contract value. The inspector was detained on May 26 of the same year near his home immediately after the money was transferred in the car. In court, Baryshev pleaded guilty, but insisted that he did not offer the money himself - he did not demand it, but only agreed to "thank you" after the entrepreneur's offer.

The entrepreneur himself stated the opposite in court: he was the official who initiated the scheme, who announced the "fee" - 1% of the contract - and offered to hand over the acts and cash in the car. The court found that Baryshev had received an unlawful benefit, but did not prove that he had demanded it. Therefore, the case was reclassified from a more serious article to a less serious one - bribery without extortion.

The court fined the defendant UAH 17,000 and banned him from working in the government for a year, but released him from punishment due to the expiration of the statute of limitations.

In May, the Court of Appeal remanded in custody Serhiy Bezdolnyi, an employee of a Mykolaiv utility company involved in a corruption case. According to the investigation, he was involved in a scheme to embezzle city budget funds during the purchase of equipment worth over UAH 5.3 million. According to law enforcement, the city lost about UAH 600,000 as a result of the scheme through so-called kickbacks.

Анна Бальчінос