Prosecutors returned over 62,000 hectares of illegally alienated land in 2023 - Kostin
Kyiv • UNN
In 2023, Ukrainian prosecutors returned more than 62,000 hectares of state land that had been illegally alienated. Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin spoke about numerous schemes of illegal land transfers, emphasizing the systematic fight against land fraud.
Despite a significant number of "schemes" for the illegal alienation of land, in 2023, the prosecutor's office managed to return more than 62 thousand hectares of land to the state, which is 26 thousand hectares more than in 2022. Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin told about this during a briefing, UNN reports.
Details
According to Kostin, the fight against land fraud is not a one-off, but a systemic one. In particular, during the year, prosecutors sent indictments to court against 8 former and current heads of the StateGeoCadastre in Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, and Kharkiv regions.
In addition, the prosecutor's office performs the functions of representing the state in court. They return assets, land, real estate, funds, etc. to the state. In 2022, more than 36 thousand hectares of land were returned to the state, and in 2023 - more than 62 thousand hectares.
He emphasized that there are numerous schemes in the land sector that use almost any simplification of the procedure to illegally enrich dishonest officials or private individuals or legal entities.
In particular, some ATCs use land inventory procedures not to restore order in land management, but to register state forestry land or especially valuable land of the National Academy of Agrarian Sciences as communal. After that, they should be transferred to private ownership as soon as possible. Citizens, in turn, sell them to some legal entity.
According to him, hundreds of hectares of state land end up in the hands of legal entities through such transactions. He also cited several other schemes for the illegal transfer of land.
Another scheme is the registration of property rights to land and property on the basis of forged documents. And despite the indisputable evidence that the state has not disposed of the disputed object in any way, and that the documents are forged, the prosecutor has to spend years seeking the truth in the courts.
Another "popular" scheme, Kostin says: "a so-called real estate object of several square meters is bought or built. After that, a land plot is obtained for the maintenance of this building, sometimes hundreds of times larger than the area of the building itself, sometimes up to 1.5 hectares."
Unfortunately, this is far from an exhaustive list of "schemes" used to steal from the state and communities - that is, ultimately, all citizens," Kostin summarized.
Recall
The owner of the investment company Concorde Capital, Ihor Mazepa, was detained while trying to travel abroad on suspicion of organizing a deal to alienate the land of critical infrastructure - the Kyiv hydroelectric power station.
A Kyiv court has placed businessman Igor Mazepa under arrest and set bail at UAH 349 million.
