The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine plans to interrogate more than a thousand ATO soldiers regarding the procedure of land privatization in Sumy region. According to detectives, the land privatized by the defenders was allegedly used by the National Academy of Agrarian Sciences. However, the court registry contains quite the opposite information - it turns out that the NAAS seized the land and leased it to commercialists for growing their crops, UNN reports.
Details
In particular, the court considered criminal proceedings regarding the unauthorized use of state land by state-owned enterprises Iskra and Nadiya.
According to the investigation, officials of the state-owned enterprises Iskra and Nadiya in Sumy region, in collusion with the management of the Institute of Agriculture of the North-East of the National Academy of Sciences, illegally cultivated almost 3,500 hectares of land and sowed crops there for the purpose of illegal enrichment. Such actions caused grave consequences for the state interests by causing material damage in excess of UAH 500 thousand.
At the same time, law enforcement officers emphasized that the said officials were well aware of the absence of title and successor documents for the land plots and did not have the relevant decisions of the executive authority or local government body on their transfer to ownership or provision for use.
"The inspection found that 31 state-owned land plots (out of 61 inspected), the ownership or use of which was not granted to anyone, are used by SE DG Iskra of ISGPS NAAS and SE DG AF Nadiya of ISGPS NAAS to grow the agricultural crop corn," the court ruling says.
In addition, the pre-trial investigation found that the management of the Institute and state-owned enterprises Iskra and Nadiya illegally sold corn planted on the squatted land to Batkivshchyna.
Subsequently, the harvest of this corn was alienated under the guise of its own grown products to legal entities, including those registered abroad. This may indicate a hidden lease of state land.
This criminal proceeding confirms that Iskra and Nadiia had no rights to the land attributed to them by the NABU and SAPO in the criminal proceedings against former Minister of Agrarian Policy Mykola Solskyi.
And even though NAAS officials themselves claimed that not a single hectare of land was leased, state-owned enterprise officials appear to have made money from hidden leases.
Since Iskra and Nadiya had no documents for the land plots, the State Geocadastre decided to divide the land and distribute it to the ATO soldiers.
However, officials of state-owned enterprises did not seem to want to lose their earnings and initiated a case against Solsky. Together with the NABU, they accuse him of helping the ATO soldiers privatize land plots they considered theirs. However, the Supreme Court ruled that these land plots never belonged to these state-owned enterprises.
To establish the truth, NABU and SAPO plan to interrogate 1,500 people, although the reasonable timeframe for the investigation has already been exhausted. The ATO members, in turn, call the NABU's actions outrageous and believethat the privatization procedure was legal, and that the state granted them this right for the protection of the territories.
It is worth noting that NABU detectives, who are on the side of the National Academy of Sciences in the Solsky case and against the transfer of land to ATO participants, tried to hide the land management expertise. They ordered this expertise themselves, but decided to abandon it when it was ready. This is very likely to indicate that the expert opinion could have testified to the innocence of the former minister.