Kravchenko accuses NABU director Kryvonas of a land scheme worth around €62,000

Head of the Kyiv Regional Administration Ruslan Kravchenko has published a new video with details of his accusations against NABU Director Oleksandr Kryvonas.

According to Kravchenko, in 2014 Kryvonas participated in a scheme involving the receipt of around €62,000 for a plot of land in the Obukhiv district of Kyiv region.

In 2014, Kryvonas headed the registration service of the Obukhiv city-district department of justice. According to the published materials, in March of that year a resident named Vladyslav Ruzmatov approached the head of the Starobezradychivska village council, Petro Horbachenko, with a request to allocate him 0.25 hectares of land in the village of Tarasivka free of charge.

According to the investigation, Horbachenko initially demanded around €104,000 to resolve the matter. Ruzmatov then turned to law enforcement and subsequently acted under their supervision. Ultimately, the amount of alleged unlawful benefit cited in the case materials came to around €62,000.

Kravchenko claims that Horbachenko brought Kryvonas and an intermediary, Vitaliy Bulashenko, into the scheme. The plan was to first register the plot to a straw man free of charge, and then formally sell it to Ruzmatov — in this way, the transfer of money was intended to appear as an ordinary land purchase-and-sale transaction.

The plot was allocated to Vitaliy Overchenko. On September 30, 2014, the registration service under Kryvonas’s leadership registered ownership rights in his name. Overchenko then, according to the investigation, issued a power of attorney to Dmytro Shnaider at Kryvonas’s direction to sell the land to Ruzmatov.

The materials also separately describe an attempt to understate the official value of the plot. The investigation claims that Kryvonas instructed someone to find an appraiser who could value the land at less than around €3,000. As a result, the plot, whose market value was assessed at 345,000 hryvnias, was appraised at 149,896 hryvnias and 25 kopecks — around €3,000. According to the investigation, this was intended to reduce taxes and allow the parties to avoid non-cash payment.

However, the deal never went through. On October 31, 2014, at a notary’s office, when the paperwork was already being processed and the money was being counted, Shnaider received a message on his phone and unexpectedly refused to complete the transaction. The deal was first postponed to November 3 and then abandoned entirely.

The published video also claims that on October 31 itself, Kryvonas met with the deputy prosecutor of Obukhiv district, Oleksiy Pavlushko. Following that meeting, according to the investigation, Kryvonas abruptly stopped talking on the phone and began avoiding contact with the other alleged participants in the scheme.

Kryvonas is ultimately charged with soliciting unlawful benefit on an especially large scale for actions carried out using his official position, by prior conspiracy as part of a group, as well as organizing the production of a knowingly falsified land valuation report. Kravchenko had previously also stated that Kryvonas is accused of fictitiously adopting a child in order to evade accountability in court.

At the same time, the Office of the Prosecutor General annulled the notice of suspicion issued to Kryvonas. Kravchenko called this decision unlawful.