Hidden lease of NAAS land: new facts of inappropriate management of state land
Kyiv • UNN
Law enforcement officials are investigating the illegal lease of NAAS land and the sale of crops at reduced prices. Due to this scheme, state-owned enterprises lost almost a billion hryvnias, although the NAAS denies the lease.
The National Academy of Agrarian Sciences (NAAS) manages significant land resources and declares that it conducts exclusively scientific work on them. However, a number of lawsuits and criminal proceedings indicate that in fact the Academy may be leasing state land in a hidden manner and making money on "gray schemes," UNN writes .
Details
In particular, law enforcement officers investigated criminal proceedings regarding the illegal lease of state land and the sale of agricultural products harvested on it at reduced prices.
According to the investigation, the management of the National Academy of Sciences, officials of institutes and state-owned enterprises subordinated to the Academy, entered into fake contracts with private enterprises under their control for the alleged provision of land cultivation services. However, in fact, they secretly leased the land plots. At the same time, all payments to the controlled private companies for the services rendered were made exclusively in cash.
In addition, most of the private enterprises that provided land cultivation services also later purchased the harvest at a reduced price. As stated in the court's ruling, this indicates a deliberate substitution of the lease agreement for the concepts of land cultivation services and crop supply agreements.
According to the conclusion of the expert examination conducted as part of the criminal investigation, state-owned enterprises lost almost billion hryvnias due to the said illegal scheme.
This criminal proceeding involves the already "well-known" state-owned enterprises Iskra and Nadiia, which, with the assistance of the NABU, are trying to take away land plots from more than a thousand ATO soldiers.
Interestingly, the NAAS officials themselves tried to convince that not a single hectare of land was leased. However, information from law enforcement agencies may indicate that this is not the case.
Context
The above-mentioned state-owned enterprises Iskra and Nadiya are also the initiators of the case against former Minister of Agrarian Policy Mykola Solsky. Together with the NABU, they accuse him of helping the ATO soldiers privatize land plots that they considered theirs. However, the Supreme Court ruled that these land plots never belonged to these state-owned enterprises. To establish the truth, the 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 believe that the privatization procedure was legal, and that the state granted them this right for the protection of their 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 expertise could have testified to the innocence of the former minister.