More than 100 houses remain unrepaired: in Hostomel, representatives of the military administration embezzled 21 million hryvnias allocated for reconstruction

A total of 100 damaged houses in the Hostomel community remain unrepaired, partly due to the misappropriation of construction materials worth 11 million hryvnias (around 277.4 thousand euros) by the former head of the Hostomel Military Administration. The total amount of irregularities discovered during the audit for the period of 2022 and 2023 has reached over 21 million hryvnias (about 529.5 thousand euros).

This was reported by the head of the State Audit Service of Ukraine, Alla Basalaeva.

She mentioned that local residents started complaining about the lack of construction work.

“Unfortunately, these cases have been confirmed. Funds for reconstruction were allocated, contractors promptly acquired them, ‘forgetting’ at the same time to fulfill their primary obligations – to repair or rebuild the destroyed houses,” Basalaeva said.

According to her, the former chief of the Hostomel Military Administration, having received these materials from the Kyiv Regional Administration amounting to nearly 11 million hryvnias, simply misappropriated them.

Additionally, auditors found a shortage of charitable aid (construction materials) totaling 1.2 million hryvnias in one of the communal enterprises of the Hostomel Village Council.

The head of the State Audit Service also provided examples of dishonest contractors who were allocated budgetary funds for restoration work but did not complete or only partially completed them.

This happened with houses in the villages of Moshun and Hostomel. In one house, the roof was supposed to be restored, and in another, broken windows were to be replaced—according to documents, the work was completed and paid for, but in reality, residents were left without the promised repairs. Almost 0.5 million hryvnias were allocated from the city budget for just these two projects. At the same time, the Hostomel Military Administration replaced windows in buildings for some developers for 2.9 million hryvnias, even though people do not live there, and the apartments have not been sold.

“These are just a few episodes of what auditors discovered during the review of budget funds allocated for restoration. Unfortunately, over 100 cases of failure to perform housing restoration work for the residents of the Hostomel community have been recorded,” said Basalaeva.”