How Odesa turned booking into a business

The scandal of fictitious booking of utility workers continues in Odesa. Despite the criminal proceedings, the criticality status has been restored even to those housing and communal services whose managers are under investigation. The mayor's office continues to conceal the number of booked utility workers and says that "the check is ongoing." At the same time, the number of utility workers is growing sharply.

It seems that the Odesa authorities are doing everything to keep this story in the Register of Court Decisions. However, Intent and the Center for Public Investigations found out that our roofs and pipes have been repaired, or rather not repaired, for a long time, not just by plumbers, but, for example, by a realtor or a head of a construction company.

Secret booking

The criticality status of an enterprise is determined by the regional military administration, in accordance with a resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers. Thus, in Odesa region, the order to grant criticality is signed by Oleg Kiper. The list of industries that can receive criticality status can be found on the website of the Odesa Military Administration.

However, you will not be able to see the list of actual companies that have booked employees here - the administration is hiding which companies have used the criticality status. The OMA has refused to make this information public before. For example, in 2024, at the request of the Center for Public Investigations. And in August 2025, they refused to provide a copy of the order at the request of Intent journalists. They explained the concealment of information as "national security".

Interestingly, the neighboring city of Mykolaiv does not consider this a matter of national security. Moreover, the list of enterprises that are of strategic importance for the economy and security of the state is published on the government's website.

In addition, Odesa even hides statistics on the number of reserved enterprises and employees subject to military service. They say that this requires creating "additional information," which is not part of the officials' job description.

According to Volodymyr Zelenchuk, a lawyer at the Institute of Mass Information NGO, the Odesa Regional State Administration's refusal to issue the order may be justified in view of "national security," but it undoubtedly violates the Law on Access to Public Information.

"In fact, the regional state administration could have provided a copy of the order, hiding sensitive information in advance, given the fact that the document itself was not previously assessed as requiring access restrictions," the lawyer says.

Reservation is not for everyone

According to the order of the Odesa Military Administration, municipal enterprises in Odesa region have the right to reserve 50% of their employees. As Leonid Grebenyuk, head of the Department of Municipal Economy of Odesa City Hall, told Intent, the relevant order was signed in March 2025. According to it, the criticality of three city utilities was not confirmed. These are the Odesa Development Program Agency, the Waste Management Service Administrator, and the City Agency for Housing Privatization. The rest were able to book 50% of their employees.

In total, there are 32 municipal enterprises in Odesa. Unfortunately, we do not know the number of their employees as of 2025 - this information is also hidden. Now it is the Odesa City Hall.

"The number of bookings at enterprises of any form of ownership is not public information during martial law," the city council's press service replied.

"Therefore, to understand the scale, we will use open data for 2024. According to the Opendatabot portal, in 2024, these enterprises officially employed 7,781 workers. All of these utilities, except for the three mentioned above, can book up to 50% of their employees who are liable for military service. Interestingly, it was in 2024 that a significant number of utilities doubled or even tripled the number of employees.

For example, according to this data, Cheremushky Housing and Utility Company employed 32 people in 2023, and 102 in 2024. Or in the Chornomorsky housing cooperative: 85 and 199, respectively. The same is true for the Porto-Frankivsk housing cooperative, which increased the number of employees from 368 to 507. However, there are some where there is a shortage of people, such as in the Porto-Frankivsk Housing Office, where, according to the acting director Tetiana Liubina, there are 200 people missing to fill the entire staffing table.

Data from OpenDataBot

Scheme with "dead souls"

Law enforcement officers suspect three municipal enterprises of Odesa City Council and one private enterprise that provides utilities under agreements with the city hall of fictitious employment.

These are the municipal utility company Porto-Frankivsk, the municipal utility company Fontansky, the municipal utility company Khmelnytsky, and Vitole LLC. These names appear in the criminal proceedings. Intent has learned from court decisions that law enforcement officers are requesting dozens of orders to appoint them to various municipal positions - janitors, stove operators, etc. For example, we learned from the ruling of the Peresypskyi District Court that the acting director of thePorto-FrankivskHousing and Communal Services Company, Oleksandr Saichuk, illegally hired and booked 14 people. They were hired for various technical positions (complex cleaning workers, locksmith, foreman, stove maker, and others), but in fact, these people did not work for the housing and communal services. According to the law enforcement officers, who expressed their opinion in one of the petitions to the court, the salaries of these workers were appropriated by the management of the FSH.

"In addition, this corruption scheme was agreed with officials of the Department of Municipal Economy of the Odesa City Council, namely the supervisors of the work of FSWs, who receive part of the illegal benefit," the prosecutor's office said in an explanation.

In general, law enforcement officers suspect that officials of the Porto-Frankivsk Municipal Housing Office and the Fontansky Municipal Housing Office set up a scheme to misappropriate funds intended for salaries and other payments. For this purpose, they fictitiously registered more than 50 employees.

In her turn, the acting director of the Porto-Frankivsk Housing and Communal Services, Tetiana Liubyna, assured Intent's journalists that the law enforcement accusations have no basis in fact. She says that she personally booked the employees who work daily at the production sites.

"I took off the wanted list and booked foremen, senior foremen, site managers, plumbers, roofers - working people," she said.

Currently, she said, only 49 people are booked in the housing office.

Law enforcement officers suspect the managers of the Khmelnytsky housing complex of fake employment of at least five people. Here, during the search, the investigator seized orders for the employment of people who did not actually work in the FSH, but were engaged in their own business - car repairs and resale.

According to law enforcement officers, the owner of Vitole LLC, Oleksandr Komarov, also made money on armor. This is a private company that has been operating since 2010 and provides heat supply services to the city - steam, hot water and air conditioning. That is why they were granted the status of a critical enterprise.

In this case, law enforcement officers managed to recreate the fake employment scheme. They found out that this became possible thanks to the activities of lawyer Sviatoslav Chumachenko, former prosecutor of the Illichivsk local prosecutor's office in Odesa region, who is currently actively providing services to people liable for military service.

Screenshot: Svyatoslav Chumachenko's Instagram page

Chumachenko was the one who "brought clients" to the company. When conscripts who had not updated their data and were on the wanted list turned to the lawyer for legal assistance, he offered them "employment" at Vitole. For his services in booking and removing data from the search database, the lawyer asked for between 9,500 and 11,000 USD. But the director's salary was probably the monthly salary of a fictitious employee, and the fake workers did not have to go to work.

Intent contacted Svyatoslav Chumachenko's lawyer Denys Tolpyg for comment, but he said that his client did not authorize him to do so.

"I will pass your request on to him, and if he agrees, I will comment," he promised, but although there was enough time to pass on our proposal, the lawyer has remained silent so far.

Currently, the director of the Porto-Frankivsk Housing Office, Oleksandr Saichuk, and the company's HR manager have been suspended from their positions. As for the defendants in the Vitole case, lawyer Svyatoslav Chumachenko will be detained until September 11, 2025, without the possibility of bail, the deputy director was released on bail of UAH 3 million, and the director of the company, Oleksandr Komarov, is wanted because he fled.

The heads of the Fontansky and Khmelnytsky housing offices have not yet been suspected. However, law enforcement officers have calculated that in the first one alone, in 2024 and 2025, eight third-degree plumbers, five janitors, and one plasterer were probably falsely employed at the Porto-Frankivsk housing and communal services company.

Interestingly, no one wants to name the names of the people who used the "booking services." The police say they are investigating, the housing office says we have no documents, everything has been seized. We will not respond to the request because it is a disclosure of personal data. At the same time, anonymous telegram channels are publishing names in a race against time. Intent decided to check and identify some of these names. And we really succeeded. Our sources in law enforcement confirmed that all of them appeared in the orders of the utility companies to hire them.

For example, Serhiy Sultanov, the owner of two companies, was employed as a janitor at Portofrankivske Municipal Utility Company. One of his LLCs, Garant Alliance, has been on the market since November 2011 and is registered in Mykolaiv, and is engaged in water transport services. The other, Buksyr-International, was registered in September 2024 in Odesa and is engaged in the construction of residential and non-residential premises.

Sergiy Sultanov is also interesting because in the past he was related to Concorde Raid Terminal LLC, which is part of the corporate group of the family of Mykola Kapatsyna, a member of the Mykolaiv City Council.

Screen of tags from Getcontact

Intent's journalists wrote to Serhiy Sultanov in all messengers so that he could comment on this coincidence. However, he has not yet responded. Moreover, the last time he was online (according to, for example, Telegram) was more than a month ago.

Another nominal employee of the housing office, according to law enforcement, Serhiy Yavorsky, is a co-owner of two real estate agencies. One of them, OF Abacus LLC, was registered in December 2005, and the other, Adilis PE, in September 2009. Both companies have the same address and phone number. However, the phone number turned out to be out of service.

In addition, Intent's journalists identified another fake "janitor" by a complete name match - Vyacheslav Lakhmay, the owner of the companies Deitron and Int-Trade. The first company has been engaged in wholesale trade in grain, unprocessed tobacco, seeds and animal feed since June 2013. The second one has been engaged in retail trade since December 2013.

The journalists called Vyacheslav Lakhmay, but the phone numbers listed as the contact numbers for these companies did not exist. They also failed to find him at the addresses of the companies. One of the addresses turned out to be the Shag Computer Academy, and they had never heard of Int-Trade. At the other, there was no Deutron LLC either.

Artur Sprugis, a member of the charitable foundation "Course Odesa" and the owner of the trademark of the same name, was employed at the Fontansky housing complex. Intent also tried to contact him, but he disappeared from all radars, as they say, although he had previously administered the Telegram channel"Course Odesa". And the head of the charitable foundation and owner of the TG, Viktor Pantiuk, assured that he does not communicate with Artur Sprugis and does not know anything about him.

So, as we can see, none of the identified people is currently available - their phones are disconnected, they are offline and absent from their workplaces. Intent is ready to give these people the floor if they contact the editorial office.

In turn, according to law enforcement, at least five people are employed at Khmelnytsky Housing and Communal Services. One of them is engaged in repairs and does not actually work at the housing office, another is engaged in the resale of cars and also does not go to work at the housing office.

According to Dmytro Oleksandrov, deputy director of Khmelnytskyi, they did not have nominal employees, and only booked actual workers.

"Everything is transparent, and there was no fictitious employment," he says. But he does not comment on the suspicions of law enforcement.

Deregistered for the sake of it

After law enforcement officers notified the heads of the housing and communal services of suspicion of obstructing the legitimate activities of the Armed Forces of Ukraine through fictitious employment, the head of Odesa, Hennadiy Trukhanov, announced an inspection of the booked enterprises on his Telegram channel.

A month has passed since this order, but the results of the inspection are still pending. The press service of the City Hall informed Intent that the inspection is still ongoing. They also said that they might revise the list of booked businesses.

However, as Intent's journalists learned, the status of critical enterprises for the Porto-Frankivsk and Fontansky housing offices was renewed on August 1. This was done by Oleh Kiper, the head of the DIA.

"As soon as we received information about the "dead souls" at these FSHs, we revoked their status following a letter from law enforcement agencies. But given the fact that someone has to clean the streets and clear the debris after the flights, this status was actually restored to them," Kiper explained in a comment to Intent.

According to him, a special commission of the OVA, together with the TCC, the administration of Prymorskyi district and the city council, checked all the employees of these two housing offices and are now sure that they are real utility workers.

Kiper also noted that he is waiting for a report from the city council on the inspection of other housing and communal services.

"We checked only two companies, and if I'm not mistaken, there are ten of them," he emphasized.

So, as we can see, the reservation scheme in Odesa has turned the state mechanism for protecting critical areas into a way to evade mobilization. Instead of real workers, businessmen, bloggers and realtors appeared on paper. And according to law enforcement, budget money intended for salaries ended up in the pockets of officials and intermediaries. So, despite some revelations, only some of the perpetrators have been brought to justice, while the system as a whole is likely to continue to operate.

This article was produced with the support of the program "Stronger Together: Media and Democracy" program implemented by the World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) in partnership with the Association of Independent Regional Publishers of Ukraine (AIRPU) and the Norwegian Media Business Association (MBL) with support from Norway. The views of the authors do not necessarily reflect the official position of the program partners.

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