Journalists analyzed data on thousands of real estate properties in Dubai, mainly for 2020 and 2022. It turned out that among the owners of luxury real estate in Dubai are current Ukrainian officials from the Cabinet of Ministers, the defense enterprise, and the Kyiv City Administration. This is also stated in the investigation by journalists of the Schemes project, UNN reports .
Details
Within the framework of the international project Dubai Unlocked, Skhemy journalists gained access to data on owners of real estate in Dubai and found among them current Ukrainian officials who own property in the Emirates but do not inform Ukrainian society about it, as required by anti-corruption legislation
In particular, the "heroes" of the project were Vitaliy Koblosh, Director of the Department of Humanitarian and Social Policy of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, Viktor Perepelytsia, Head of the Bureau of the Iskra Research and Production Complex, and Dmytro Rakhmatullin, Acting Head of the KCSA Motor Transport Company.
Україна покращила позицію в індексі сприйняття корупції: отримала 36 балів зі 10030.01.24, 11:24
Vitaliy Koblosh
Journalists found out that the wife of Vitaliy Koblosh, a senior official in the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, Natalia, bought one of the largest rooms in the Wyndham Dubai Marina hotel in Dubai in 2018. The room cost more than 331 thousand dollars.
Natalia herself works in the capital and is the head of the Women's Counseling Department at the Institute of Pediatrics in Kyiv.
However, Koblosh's declaration from last year, as well as subsequent ones, does not contain this information. Two years later, in 2020, Koblosh joined the government's corruption risk assessment team.
Koblosh has been head of the government's Department of Humanitarian and Social Policy for almost a decade. His task is to prepare government resolutions, particularly on education and healthcare.
Viktor Perepelytsia
In February 2014, his wife Iryna Perepylitsa purchased an apartment in the Burj Vista Tower 1 skyscraper in Dubai. According to the leaked data, this property cost the woman 430 thousand dollars.
It is known that has also been rented out since 2018 and has been making a profit. Since then, the amount of income has amounted to more than $154 thousand, which Perepelytsia has not declared either.
As Skhemy found out, Viktor Perepelytsia has been working at the Iskra plant for 20 years. He is the head of the logistics management bureau.
The plant produces equipment in the field of radar and electronic warfare. The company is part of the state concern Ukroboronprom.
The official has been submitting declarations since 2016, but does not mention his wife's foreign property of 84 square meters.
Ukroboronprom says that Perepelytsia has not been a "subject of declaration since October 2023 due to changes in the law." However, her husband still filed declarations for all the years of martial law in early 2024, after the resumption of mandatory declarations, and did not list the family's Dubai property in any of them.
Dmitry Rakhmatullin
The Dubai registry shows Rakhmatullin's ownership of 16 apartments in the Ferretti Luxury Beach Residence skyscraper with a total area of 2,255 thousand square meters, which is the size of two Olympic-standard swimming pools. However, the building has not been completed since 2009.
Rakhmatullin's "virtual apartments" cost $14.5 million.
Dmytro Rakhmatullin is currently acting director of the Kyiv City Hall's municipal motor transport enterprise. From 2018 until recently, he was in charge of the Kyiv Parking Inspectorate. Rakhmatullin has held various positions in the capital since 2015.
None of Rakhmatullin's declarations for the last three years, which he filed this year, mention his Dubai assets: neither in the section "objects under construction" nor in the section "securities" nor in the section "financial obligations to the declarant.
For reference
Dubai Unlocked is an international project based on leaked information from the Dubai Land Department as well as state-owned utilities obtained by the Washington-based Center for Defense Studies (C4ADS).
This data was subsequently passed on to the Norwegian financial publication E24 and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which coordinated with more than 70 media outlets around the world. Among them is Radio Liberty's Schemes project.
Recall
The National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption (NAPC), during its monitoring, found signs of acquisition of unjustified assets by the head of the territorial service center of the MIA's Main Service Center in Dnipropetrovs'k region worth almost UAH 7 million.