Former head of the State Geocadastre denied NABU's accusations about ATO soldiers' land and told how he and former Minister Solsky “criminally” helped soldiers 1 October 2024

Former head of the State Geocadastre Oleksandr Kolotilin commented to UNN on the NABU case against former Minister of Agrarian Policy Mykola Solsky, in which he is also a defendant. He explains that the land transferred to the ATO soldiers did not belong to the National Agrarian Academy, and therefore cannot be returned back, as SAPO detectives and prosecutors are likely to seek. He claims that the agricultural state-owned enterprises Iskra and Nadiya did not have documents for these plots, and the NABU's accusations are groundless, as there is at least no corpus delicti.

⁃      You have been acting head of the StateGeoCadastre since 2017, and now you are one of the suspects in the case of former Agricultural Policy Minister Mykola Solsky, which some have already labeled a political  “witch hunt.”  How do you view this case, what do you have in common with Solsky  and why are you abroad?

I was the director of the Department for Land Control and Protection, and  yes,   for some time I was acting head of the StateGeoCadastre. The criminal proceedings were opened after I had resigned from the StateGeoCadastre and was no longer holding any public office. When the full-scale war started, my wife and three children and I moved abroad, as we lived near Kyiv, in the Vyshhorod district. The children went to school here, so we have been living here as long as the war has been going on, and this has nothing to do with the criminal proceedings. As for the suspicion allegedly served on me by the NABU and the SAPO, I still don't understand its text, and the latter have not handed me this document to this day. If it was really a seizure of property in the interests of third parties, then we should at least be interested in this, but in fact  this land is owned by the same people who received it in those years (2017 - ed.)

⁃      Why is this case called political?

The NABU's accusations are based on the fact that former Minister Mykola Solsky was the organizer of the seizure of state-owned enterprises' land, and I was included as a co-organizer. In fact, I have never even worked in the Sumy region, where the state-owned enterprises Iskra and Nadiya are located.

According to the regulations on the main department of the StateGeoCadastre, the land managers were not the central office where I worked, but the local departments, and they made the appropriate decisions based on the appeals of Ukrainian citizens and the relevant documents submitted. NABU detectives and SAPO prosecutors do not specify in their suspicion texts which specific requirements of land legislation were violated in the disposal of these lands. Therefore, in my opinion, this case is definitely political.

⁃      Please describe in detail what the “crime” is. According to the NABU, ex-Minister Solsky, you and other suspects in 2017 “organized a scheme” under which  ATO fighters  were able to privatize land plots, which, again, so far  only according to the investigation, belonged at that time to the National Agrarian Academy represented by its local state-owned enterprises Iskra and Nadiya. How,  even theoretically,  could the StateGeoCadastre register the land for ATO participants, if the system should have listed state-owned enterprises of the National Academy of Agrarian Sciences as land users  and what state land did you personally  take possession of at that time

For me, this is also a question: how can one be charged with seizing state land if the organizers, as they call us, had nothing to do with this land and have nothing to do with it.

In January 2017, I was appointed director of the Department for Land Control and Protection, which had the authority to inspect land. The plans for the inspection included state-owned enterprises, i.e. not only Iskra and Nadiia.

The inspection revealed that Iskra and Nadiia did not have land documents, so their directors received inspection reports and protocols on certain offenses, including unauthorized occupation of land plots and deterioration of their condition.

I emphasize once again that this is not an isolated inspection of state-owned enterprises in Ukraine, because at that time there was already a fairly large resonance about the cultivation of state land not by state-owned enterprises, but under some contracts, and this was all going outside the budget.

I recall, and now, after a more in-depth study of this issue with my lawyer, I can emphasize once again that neither  Iskra nor  Nadiia had any document confirming their property rights to these land plots during the period of independent Ukraine.  These companies were established in 1991 and have been reorganized several times since. During the time of independent Ukraine, these enterprises have never received any documents for the land.

-         That is, the StateGeoCadastre system did not contain data that these land plots were used by the NAAS represented by SE Iskra and SE Nadiia?

Since 2013, the State Land Cadastre has been operating and the Register of Real Estate Rights has been in place. There were no records in either registry regarding the lands of Iskra and Nadiia. Therefore, the NABU's view that these state-owned enterprises were the administrators of the land allocated to the ATO soldiers is not entirely clear. In addition, NABU is manipulating the facts.

The suspicion has such an interesting wording - “these lands were put up for auction so that no one would take them away”. They forgot that in June 2017, the Cabinet of Ministers adopted a decree on the Strategy for the Management of State Land Resources, which banned the allocation of land plots and tied them to the number of lease rights sold at auction. At that time, any transfer of land plots was stopped for a year, and the ATO soldiers blocked the main departments of land resources, which caused very high tension until December 2017.

It was at that time that I was entrusted with the interim duties of the head of the State Geocadastre. We managed to amend the regulation and allow ATO participants to be outside this rule, i.e. we allowed them to receive land plots. Only then did the allocation begin. That is, the NABU's manipulation is that these lands were allegedly held back on purpose to select people. But this would definitely not have happened with the ATO soldiers.

⁃      What do you know about the State Act for the lifetime use of land of the Stalin artel, whose successor is allegedly SE Iskra, and this is almost the only argument of the NABU in favor of their version that these land plots should not have been privatized by the Ukrainian military?

The NABU claims that the Stalin Artel received a State Act for the lifetime use of land in 1953. And that the Stalin artel is the state-owned enterprise Iskra. In my opinion, this is legal nonsense, since artels, collective farms, state farms, and so on all existed in the Soviet Union, and in independent Ukraine, there was no such form of management. And there was no succession in such cases.

-         While researching this case, we found that, by and large, this Act for the lifetime use of land, which even the NABU and SAPO rely on in courts, could be a fake? After all, it exists only in a copy, and in the document, “Stalin's artel” was crossed out with a pen (by someone) and “Iskra” was written in with a pen instead. Can this be considered a legally binding document at all?

Of course, a copy cannot be considered a legal document. And  it is quite obvious that  the copy of the State Act issued to the Stalin artel does not give any rights to use the land to the newly created state enterprise Iskra in independent Ukraine. “Iskra is not the legal successor of the Soviet artel named after Stalin, which has been repeatedly investigated in courts and during inspections. When studying the available materials, even the additional materials of the investigation, I can say with certainty that the state-owned enterprises Iskra and Nadezhda have nothing to do with the Stalin artel, even theoretically, as successors. After investigating all these issues, decisions were made to allocate land to the ATO soldiers 1 year later.

So it's not like the State Geocadastre conducted an inspection and immediately transferred these land plots to some people the next day. No, they were first put up for auction. Then there was more than one meeting with these associations of ATO veterans, because they demanded that they be granted permits to develop projects. So this story went on for quite some time. And there were many such stories throughout Ukraine in every region. Because the StateGeoCadastre had more than 200,000 applications from ATO participants under consideration.

⁃      That is, in fact, these state-owned enterprises Iskra and Nadiya lost their rights  to the mentioned  land plots  long before the ATO began to formalize them, and even longer before Solsky appeared there

I will say more, they did not lose them, they did not acquire them. They simply never acquired these land plots and never formalized them. This is a bit of a Soviet approach, so to speak. There used to be an artel here, there used to be a state farm here. It's all ours, it's all state-owned, it's all common. We process it.

I remember when I started my work in the body, then it was called the State Agency of Ukraine for Land Resources, and the vice prime ministers repeatedly instructed state-owned enterprises to register land within a year, six months, a year and a half. The last one I remember was probably in 2014-2015, when Hennadiy Zubko was deputy prime minister. And all state-owned enterprises were instructed to register land plots. That is, what prevented you from registering these land plots before the inspection in 2017, starting from 1991, when these enterprises were created,  if you believed that you had the right to them? No one has done so in 26 years.

⁃      Let's talk more about the distribution and registration of land for the military, because according to NABU, this all happened almost in a few days, and the ATO soldiers  were selected in advance and knew that they had to transfer this land to someone immediately

They themselves claim that it was an “ongoing crime” from 2017 to 2021, which means that it was impossible to pinpoint it in a few days.

How did this procedure work back then? A citizen applies for permission to develop a land management project for a land plot for, in this case, personal farming. He receives this permission, orders a land management project from an organization that has the right to do so. Then this project is agreed upon, approved by the chief administrator, and then the person registers the right to this land plot. That is, there is a certain algorithm of actions that must be followed.

How did this work with ATO veterans across Ukraine? Since the guys were often on rotation there, they were not in place, and so on, all their interests were represented by certain organizations, associations in which they united. There was one organization or association in Chernihiv region, another in Sumy region, another in Kyiv region, and so on. Since there were a lot of ATO veterans and many rights to land, they chose associations and organizations that could represent their interests. And these organizations and associations mainly dealt with legal issues: that is, they were really organized.

-         So who was the initiator in this case, the ATO or the organizers of the scheme according to NABU: you, Solsky and the rest? 

The initiators were the ATO soldiers, of course. What those who worked in the StateGeoCadastre had to do was to consider their applications. And if it is possible and legal, if the desired land plot is not leased or in use, to grant permission to develop the project. Then they had to approve it, enter these plots in the state land cadastre, and approve the project. At this stage, the role of the StateGeoCadastre body ended with the approval of the project. Next, they registered the rights in the register of rights. Every day in every region, applications from ATO participants were considered. It was a massive phenomenon, and the body was overwhelmed by these applications and the work that had to be done. Therefore, to say that we were running around, picking up some people to issue them, I don't know. I can't even imagine that we could find the time to deal with such issues. Especially with the ATO soldiers, who were in control of everything. They came with such scandals that even if everything was done according to the law, there were often conflicts. There were, for example, some unregistered vegetable gardens. And very often it was necessary to resolve this not by correspondence, but simply by gathering people, representatives, and negotiating to avoid these conflicts.

⁃      So it turns out that the inspection of state land and this situation in Sumy region with the ATO soldiers' demand to provide them with land  coincided in time? That is, they were already choosing from the land that was listed as free in the State Geocadastre?

Yes, these were  legally free lands. And I want to emphasize once again that this was not only the case with Iskra and Nadiia, but in every region there were such cases. There were cases everywhere when ATO soldiers came and said: these are land plots that have no documents and we demand that you give them to us, we have not yet received them from these people. They filed applications, they were considered, and if these land plots were not really owned and used, they were granted to them  because there were no legal grounds for refusal. The ATO soldiers were not so much interested in the plots themselves, but in the income they could receive from the land, so they chose those that were in demand by agricultural companies. They are the largest tenants of such land plots.

That is why there are manipulations on the part of NABU here as well. They claim that agricultural companies were looking for ATO members to register land for them. In fact, in most cases, the ATO soldiers were looking for agricultural companies or farmers to whom  they could immediately lease their land and receive real money for it from the first month. And again, this is about the whole of Ukraine, it was like that everywhere.

⁃      That is, in this case it could also be the case that the ATO soldiers knew in advance that they would lease the land and no one forced them to do so

I'm sure of it. Because the vast majority did so. They are military men, they are not farmers. They don't even spend much time at home, but they have families to support. Therefore, this is an additional income, which I am convinced they absolutely deserve.  And no one can force them to do anything. They are the owners, they make their own decisions.

⁃      We talked https://unn.ua/news/my-dumaly-shcho-dokumenty-na-zemliu-buly-ale-tak-yikh-i-ne-znaishly-initsiatory-spravy-proty-eksministra-solskoho-rozpovily-novi-podrobytsi to the director of the Institute of Agriculture of the North-East of the National Academy of Sciences, to whom Iskra and Nadiya were directly subordinated  before they were transferred to the State Property Fund. And we asked them whether they had any documents confirming  the NABU's version that the land was in their use. The director answered us literally: “You know, everyone thought that there were documents, but  later it turned out that there were none.” In other words, it turns out that these SOEs themselves did not actually have documents for the land. In fact, it was used all this time in the “gray” until the ATO soldiers legalized it for themselves. It turns out that the question is also to the heads of the SOEs themselves, who negligently treated their duties and did not register the land they should have registered for decades?

I will tell you this. This is such a systemic violation that it is not just about Iskra and Nadiia.  Why is that? Either the National Academy of Sciences did not pay enough attention, or there was no one responsible for the registration of this resource, or there were some other reasons. Because the initiator of this should always have been the directors of legal entities, that is, not the Academy of Agrarian Sciences itself, not the Institute of Agriculture, but a specific state-owned enterprise, since they are independent legal entities, and the head of this state-owned enterprise had to initiate it . And only he could submit the appropriate  petition. The Academy of Agrarian Sciences could not do it for him.

⁃      When the issue of land transfer to ATO soldiers came up, were there any complaints from anyone? In particular, from the heads of state-owned enterprises of the National Academy of Agrarian Sciences. After all, it is suspicious that this story publicly  “surfaced”, as they say, seven years later.

In fact, I don't remember any employees of these two state-owned enterprises coming. We still need to see if there were employees there, because very often we had a state-owned enterprise with five to ten people. And they were supposed to cultivate thousands of hectares. There were such cases. The appeals were made after we handed over the inspection materials to the National Police, and criminal proceedings were opened  regarding  unauthorized occupation of land by these state-owned enterprises. There were some appeals after that, for sure.

⁃      In your opinion, are there any legal grounds to take away the land from the ATO and return it to the National Academy of Sciences, since according to the NABU's logic, it is they who should have taken the land away from them if they consider it to be acquired through criminal means

For this purpose, this land should have  at least once been owned by the National Academy of Sciences. And I want to repeat it again, this land was never legally registered for these state-owned enterprises.  It was state land that was in reserve. It was not in the use of other persons, so how can it be taken away from the ATO soldiers, on what  grounds? A person legally obtained ownership of this land plot, leases this land plot - what about the Constitution, which guarantees the right to ownership? They didn't come to the National Academy of Sciences demanding that their land be given back, they were free. This has been confirmed by the courts and other authorities. There is actually a legal pun going on here. The state has granted the ATO soldiers the right to privatize land plots, and now the state, represented by NABU, comes and says: no, guys, it was not state-owned or state-owned, but not there.

I myself  am surprised that the National Anti-Corruption Bureau opened this  case in July 2019, claiming that the allocation of land plots continued until 2021. Why didn't you stop it at the time of the offense? That is, you just watched the offense take place in order to take away property rights from thousands of people. It's kind of strange.

At the very least, they could have contacted the body that was the land manager at the time and found out that there were criminal proceedings for land squatting by state-owned enterprises of the National Academy of Agrarian Sciences. After all, the National Police and the Security Service of Ukraine have already studied this situation and have made a final decision that the land was squatted. And now the NABU has intervened and says it's the other way around. So who to believe if all these bodies are acting on behalf of the state?  How can this be happening at all?

⁃      Returning to the “rewritten” state act relied on by NABU and SAPO detectives - this act contains a map of land that was supposed to belong to Stalin's artel and which, according to the investigation, should have remained with Iskra. But we superimposed this map on the land plots that were privatized by the ATO, and they did not match. That is, the land that was transferred to the soldiers did not fall within the boundaries of this map. How can we say that the land is the same?

If there was a Soviet document with borders, then these borders should have been restored in the new documents of independent Ukraine. As far as I know, the NABU has no understanding of these borders, so how they consider these lands to be the same is unknown to me. 

You see, you also need to take into account the fact that if a legal entity reorganizes, changes its name, it reissues documents, showing that this previous legal entity had some documents. In the course of the audit, we investigated all this - there is no legal succession. There is no legal connection between the Stalin Artel and Iskra.

Artels received documents based on the Land Code of 1922. This is probably the first Land Code. Until now, I have not seen any land codes on the territory of Ukraine, so to speak. Because then we can recall that before  1918 these were the lands of some Hlukhiv landowner in the Chernihiv province. His descendants should get these land plots because they have more rights. They were before the Stalin artel. Let's research and see who had the documents there. You know, it was a different state, it was the Soviet Union, different rules.

-         Why can't anyone actually count the NAAS land bank

Because for decades it had not been formalized. In fact, the National Academy of Agrarian Sciences was recording squatters' land without any documents. Therefore, when this issue came up, the NAAS statistical data  did not match the reality. When Ukraine became independent, these special forms  (2zem, 6zem) were filled out for the first time. They came to the director of the collective farm. “Ivan Ivanovych, how much land do you have according to these documents?”,  ‘Three hundred hectares’,  ‘Oh, good, this collective farm has three hundred hectares’. That's how they counted.

And these figures were relied on for many years. And now there is a state land cadastre, and  it's all  in digital form, with exact coordinates, exact numbers, with an understanding of what kind of land plots they are.  There was no such accounting back then, it was more of a statistical accounting, at the very beginning, I mean. And somewhere in the beginning this figure comes from, at the level of, I don't remember how many, 700 thousand hectares were counted for those enterprises, whether this number remains, I didn't follow it anymore. With the adoption of the law on the state land cadastre and the law on real rights, when the State Register of Real Rights to Real Estate, including land plots, was created, the rules of the game changed on January 1, 2013. 

That is, we cannot rely on any statistical reporting from previous years. And if I'm not mistaken, in 2015, the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Justice canceled the order on the basis of which this statistical reporting was conducted. Because these companies often claimed to have registered land without any grounds. Therefore, it is impossible to calculate the land bank if these works on establishing boundaries and registration of land plots have not been carried out. It is  a statistical figure that will always be inaccurate. That is why it is also impossible to calculate the losses completely. That's why we come to a certain conclusion that there must have been some interest in this. Since you, as a director of an enterprise, can manipulate the figures for yields, processing, herbicide application, and so on - and all this  led to the possibility of manipulating, among other things, the budgets of these enterprises.

⁃      How do you think this case will develop in the future? Because in May, the NABU's accusations sounded very sharp: large sums of money, top officials, state land. And now the case is calming down, the preventive measures are being mitigated, and the detectives are hiding all the information under the guise of secrecy,  especially if it concerns some of their  mistakes, such as the expert examination, which they tried to cancel without explanation. And this is despite the fact that the NABU has already exhausted the reasonable timeframe for the investigation.

The main marker for me was that this is the first time I have seen this in land cases when the land plots were not seized. That is, the objects of the crime are with their owners, and they have an unlimited right to dispose of these land plots. In other words, NABU is not even going to return these land plots, since it did not seize these land plots in the first place. So then what is the purpose of this case? To change the minister? I mean, what conclusion can we draw?”

When the SAPO detectives and prosecutors hand me the charges, they can't backtrack after public statements, they will hand it over to the High Anti-Corruption Court, and there it will be legally established that there is no object of the crime, since no one has seized anything . Suspicions were handed over to 12 or 13 people. And we have nothing to do with these lands, nor with the ATO soldiers, nor with third parties. It turns out that we took possession of the land in the interests of thousands of ATO soldiers. There is no object of the crime. I just don't see any prospects in this case. But it can last for 2-3 years, because there are so many suspects, so many interrogations, investigative actions, and so on.

I'm sure that out of those thousands of people, some rent, some don't rent, some process it themselves, because in addition to ATO soldiers, local residents also received it. In general, different businesses can rent there. In general, in whose interests was it done? If associations or lawyers or farmers helped someone to lease it, then this is not appropriation. In this case, you should be charged with some kind of seizure of the lease. I don't even know. There is no such article at all. How can they be linked to these third parties? How? I have more questions. I just don't know. These are secondary questions.