An Odessa developer has been notified of being named a suspect in a coastal real estate scam

In Odesa, police exposed a developer who, under the guise of renovation, illegally seized more than 7,500 square meters of municipal coastal land and built 47 townhouses there. Through his schemes and the subsequent legalization of the unauthorized construction, the developer caused losses to the city community totaling more than 50.6 million hryvnias.

This was reported by the Main Directorate of the National Police in the Odesa region.

The suspect faces up to 12 years in prison with confiscation of property.

According to law enforcement reports, in 2019, a local businessman legally leased a plot of land measuring over 2 hectares from the city council. He needed the land to build a hotel complex—an apartment hotel—in the Kyivskyi District of Odesa.

During the course of the construction work, the suspect exceeded the designated boundaries and began erecting buildings on adjacent municipal land, which is part of a slope of coastal reinforcement structures and is not designated for private development. As a result, an entire neighborhood of three-story townhouses sprang up there. 

To ensure the buildings could be put into operation without hindrance, the suspect entered false information into state electronic registries. Specifically, he presented the newly constructed apartments on someone else’s slope as a “renovation” of his own hotel. The documents stated that the work was allegedly being carried out without changing the geometric dimensions of the foundation, although in reality he was constructing the properties from scratch on a vacant hillside. 

Having thus obtained official certificates of completion for the properties, the man began legalizing the buildings through a newly established LLC. As the head of the construction cooperative, the suspect entered into fictitious contracts for the sale and purchase of property rights, effectively selling most of the townhouses to his own controlled company. He sold the remaining houses to third-party buyers.

Previously, the Odesa region ranked among the top three regions in Ukraine in terms of the numberof new construction projects. It accounts for 10.9% of the total. Only the Kyiv region (excluding Kyiv itself, at 21.3%) and the capital itself (11.2%) rank higher.

Юлія Калабайда