NAAS land bank was empty before privatization: negligence of "agrarian scientists" was to blame

The NABU case against  Minister of Agrarian Policy Mykola Solsky opened a Pandora's Box, because until then, amid the bloody war, everyone had forgotten about the scandalous National Academy of Agrarian Sciences, which was supposed to protect the land bank of Soviet collective farms, which the State Property Fund planned to put up for privatization in early 2024. Instead, it turned out that a significant area of land declared by agrarian scientists had never belonged to them and had long been privatized by others, including the ATO military, UNN writes.

The NAAS itself has not been able to calculate the area of its holdings over the years of its existence. The Academy claims to have 200,000 hectares, the State Geocadastre announced a figure of 320,000 hectares, and the Accounting Chamber, as of 2020, counted 465,000 hectares. The NABU, referring to Wikipedia, says that the National Academy of Agrarian Sciences has 584 thousand hectares of state land in use.

All of this suggests that the land of the National Academy of Sciences has been in the "shadows" for more than 20 years, most likely because it was convenient for the "scientists" themselves. According to the former head of the State Property Fund, Ihor Bilous, the land has been under cultivation all this time, but no one knows whose land it was, and it certainly wasn't for the benefit of the state.

"If you think that some of the state land is not cultivated, you are very much mistaken. All these territories are well cultivated. The only question is whose land and whether the state benefits from it," Ihor Bilous said in 2019. 

But the issue is not even that the state has been losing money for decades due to the alleged unprofitability of the National Academy of Sciences, but that the officials of the National Academy of Sciences have not formalized the land transferred to them for more than 20 years.

The case of Mykola Solsky brings to mind the mismanagement of the National Academy of Sciences, which at least borders on criminal negligence. The NABU charges the Minister of Agrarian Policy and Food of Ukraine with organizing the seizure of other people's property on a particularly large scale and participating in the destruction of documents.

We are talking about the lands claimed by the state-owned enterprises "Experimental Farm "Iskra" and "Experimental Farm "Nadiya". [Both were part of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and only last year were transferred to the State Property Fund for privatization.

According to court decisions, the only argument of the State Enterprises in court was information about the alleged inheritance of these lands from the 1950s, when these lands were registered as Stalin's artel and Lenin's state farm.

In order not to delve into the agrarian and historical account of how the artel and state farm  were transformed into Iskra and Nadiya, it is worth noting that these state-owned enterprises were unable to provide any documents to support their claims.

Suppose some documents from the Soviet era could have been lost. But in 1991, Iskra and Nadezhda were created as new enterprises, albeit on the basis of old ones.

Since independence, Iskra and Nadiia have been reorganized and changed their names several times, and during all this time, the Acts of Permanent Land Use have not been issued. This has been clearly proven by the courts of all instances.

"During the consideration of the case, the courts of previous instances found that there were no state acts for the right to permanent use of land plots both for SE Iskra, SE Nadiia and the companies whose legal successors they are.

In addition, the courts found that the decisions on granting the disputed land plots for permanent use to SE Iskra and SE Nadiya were not made in accordance with the procedure established by the Land Code of Ukraine at the time of filing a lawsuit," reads the ruling of the panel of judges of the Commercial Court of Cassation of the Supreme Court of 5 August 2019.

Viktor Kabanets, director of the Institute of Agriculture of the North-East of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, who has been in charge of Iskra and Nadiya for the past few years, complains in recent interviews that they wanted to, they asked to conduct an inventory, to clarify the boundaries of the plots, and they were allegedly constantly denied. In other words, they pretend to be a victim who is constantly being put through the wringer by someone, and expect to be believed.

However, if we assume that the land titles were not deliberately drawn up by certain NAAS officials to be used uncontrollably for gray money-making schemes, the puzzle begins to take shape.

The NABU is undoubtedly aware of this dubious land bacchanalia in the Academy and its subdivisions, as it has been investigating agricultural scientists and their dealings for years. But this time, everyone is surprised by who the detectives found guilty. Not the officials of the National Academy of Agrarian Sciences, who were supposed to be in charge of preserving and registering real estate, including land. It was the ATO soldiers who received the land, which was free at the time, as part of free privatization, and Solsky, who helped them do it as a lawyer.

At the same time, no accusations of negligence have been made against the heads of the SE and the Institute. On the contrary, Kabanets says that it was he who initiated the NABU case against the ATO soldiers. And it looks as if NABU is playing on the side of the schemers who squandered the land and are now looking for the guilty to get away with it.

Recall

Earlier , the head of the Ministry of Agrarian Policy, Mykola Solsky, commented on the suspicionsbrought against him by the NABU.

According to him, we are talking about events  in 2017-2018.

"The circumstances of seven years ago relate to a dispute between state-owned enterprises and individuals, including the ATO military, over land that was granted to the latter in accordance with the law. Disputes are resolved by the courts, including the Supreme Court, and as far as I know, a number of decisions have so far stated that state-owned enterprises have no right to the land that NABU is probably referring to," Solsky explained the situation.