State land bank plagued by corruption and theft, new cadaster head says

Ukraine’s state agricultural land bank has been
plagued by rampant corruption and theft for the last two decades, according to
an interview published on Oct. 20 of Roman Leshchenko, the head of the state
cadaster service. As a result, 1.6 mln hectares were removed from state
property during this time, without even a paper trail. The status of a total of
5 mln hectares is unknown, with the agency hoping to establish the owners once
paper documents are fully digitalized, Leshchenko told the epravda.com.ua news
site. The 31-yeer-old Leshchenko was appointed to his post in June 2020.

In addition to the 5 mln hectares of illegally transferred
land, 2.3 mln hectares are scheduled to be transferred to local communities,
1.7 mln hectares were already transferred to local communities in 2018-2019,
0.75 mln hectares remain in the ownership of state enterprises and the National
Academy of Agrarian Studies, and 0.69 mln hectares were illegally distributed
as part of privatization schemes conducted in 2013-2020. That amounts to 10.4
mln hectares in total, according to the state cadaster.

Besides land being illegally privatized, unknown persons
have illegally accessed the cadaster to redesignate commercial land as
industrial, enabling the land owners to avoid paying billions of hryvnias in
local taxes, Leshchenko said. That include UAH 1 bln that recently eluded the
Kyiv city budget. Unknown persons have also broken into the cadaster to change
the bounds and sizes of their land parcels, he said, including those owned by
elites that could include prominent politicians. “If we take the elite suburban
districts of Kyiv, there are land parcels with two-three owners with differing
documents. Moreover, new land parcels have been created among these
(pre-existing) parcels. This is practically a collapse,” Leshchenko said. He
added, “Any file in the cadaster could have been simply nullified and changed,
based on which a corporate raid could have been done.”

Zenon Zawada: This
information justifies the worries of millions of Ukrainians that a farmland
market, which had been scheduled for launch on Oct. 1, would be plagued by
corruption, lack of transparency and lack of fairness. This information could
prompt a campaign to further delay the market’s launch since a cadaster might
have to be established largely from scratch, a difficult job made worse by
incomplete or inaccurate documents and data.

This “cadaster collapse” could also involve hundreds
(if not thousands) of potential crimes of forgery and fraud, among other
offenses. Based on Leshchenko’s interview, we can’t see the launch of a
legitimate farmland market for at least the next six months, during which a
colossal amount of work and investigations need to be done.