How much did Anatolii Bondarenko and his wife Valeriia earn during his tenure as mayor of Cherkasy?
Where did Anatolii Bondarenko get the money for his luxurious mansion near Cherkasy?
Friends of the Mayor of Cherkasy: How Anatolii Bondarenko installs “his” people in the city council
Cherkasy Mayor's drivers and gardener were appointed to city council without competition
Anatoliy Bondarenko, the mayor of Cherkasy, can rightfully be considered the most successful Ukrainian mayor. But not in the development of the city, but in the amount of city land he has appropriated, the money he has earned through tenders, and the number of friends, drivers, and gardeners he has employed in the city hall. There will be few people who are indifferent to this story, because for almost 10 years of plundering the regional center, Bondarenko has remained almost unnoticed by law enforcement agencies. A real success, nothing less.
How much did Anatolii Bondarenko and his wife Valeriia earn during his tenure as mayor of Cherkasy?
Anatoly Bondarenko was elected Cherkasy mayor in November 2015. A native of the village of Lysyanka, Cherkasy region, Bondarenko began his career in the 1990s as a commodity expert at the Lysyanka construction and trade base "Building Materials", then worked at the Lysyanka District Cultural Center.
In the early 2000s, the future mayor of Cherkassy entered politics: from 2002 to 2005, he was the head of the village council of his village of Lysyanka, from 2005 to 2006, he was the head of the Lysyanka district administration. He immediately began his career as a civil servant with fraud: when he got a position, he provided a fake diploma of higher education. Because of this, in 2006, he was dismissed from the position of head of the RDA "in connection with the discovery of his inadequacy for the position held due to insufficient qualifications."
However, there was a party that did not disdain to take an official with such a background into its ranks. Since March 2010, Anatolii Bondarenko headed the Cherkasy regional organization of Yulia Tymoshenko's Batkivshchyna party; in 2014-2015, he worked as an assistant consultant to Oleksii Riabchyn, a member of the Ukrainian parliament from this political force who was tainted by buckwheat farming. And in the fall of 2015, the residents of Cherkasy elected Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc's Bondarenko as their mayor, who was re-elected for the second time in 2020, this time from the For the Future party of oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky.
Since then, the life of the former party worker and unsuccessful head of the district state administration only improved every year: access to the city's resources and budget made Anatoly Bondarenko and his family local latifundists and rich. If in 2015 the income of the mayor of Cherkassy and his wife Valeria Bondarenko was only 30.5 thousand dollars, and the family did not have any cash savings, then according to the results of 2023, the income of Anatoly Bondarenko and his wife already amounted to 491 thousand US dollars, and monetary savings reached the mark of 318 thousand dollars. In total, during the years of the mayorship, the Bondarenko family only officially earned 1.33 million US dollars.
The salary of the mayor of Cherkasy is UAH 120,000 per month, that is, an average of $3,000. In recent years, the family has received the main official income from Valeria Bondarenko's entrepreneurial activities, whose income is growing significantly every year. If in 2021 she earned $73,000, then in 2022 - twice as much, $135,000, and in 2023 - $149,600.
Valeria Bondarenko is a co-founder with a 50% stake in Premium Quality LLC, which processes milk, butter, and cheese, as well as with a 20% stake in Groupinvest Cherkasy LLC, whose main activity is the leasing and operation of its own or leased real estate. Valery Bondarenko has also been an individual entrepreneur since 2012, engaged in retail trade in non-specialized stores of food, beverages and tobacco products.
The wife of the mayor of Cherkassy is a deputy of the Cherkassy Regional Council from the "For the Future" party, she holds the position of the head of the permanent commission on ecology, use of natural resources and elimination of the consequences of emergency situations.
The estate of Cherkasy Mayor Anatolii Bondarenko: three houses on the banks of the Dnipro on almost a hectare of land
In September 2022, in the midst of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the mayor of Cherkasy began a large-scale construction of a mansion in the village of Sokyrna near Cherkasy, in a picturesque location in the forest on the banks of the Dnipro River. The estate consists of three buildings - the main one with an area of 563.8 square meters, a recreation complex with a 150-square-meter swimming pool, and a 54.2-square-meter guard house. In other words, the total area of the property is almost 770 square meters.
All this is being built at once on 9 plots of land belonging to the Bondarenko couple, with a total area of almost one hectare. Valery Bondarenko officially purchased seven of them in 2021 for a total of $10,195, Anatoliy Bondarenko bought two more for $2,477. In other words, according to their declarations, Anatoliy and Valery Bondarenko spent a total of $11,411 on a hectare of land on the coast of the Dnipro. Although the land here, due to its prestige and proximity to water, costs an average of 3.5 thousand dollars per hectare - that is, according to the market value, they would have to spend at least 350 thousand dollars for their hectare, but not an amount 30 times less.
As for the estate itself on these lands, according to Cherkasy realtors, the minimum cost of such construction should be $1,000 per square meter. That is, in general, according to minimum estimates, the estate of the Bondarenkos should have cost them 770 thousand dollars. It is only a "box" with communications without furniture, equipment and household appliances. There is also a swimming pool. That is, the housing of the mayor of Cherkassy and his wife can "pull" as much as one million US dollars.
No matter how wealthy the Bondarenko family is today, as we have already noted above, in just the last 9 years they have officially earned 1.3 million dollars, that is, they should have given almost all their money to their estate of three houses on the banks of the Dnieper. However, according to the declarations, the mayor of Cherkassy and his wife regularly put aside money savings, in addition to this, they constantly buy land plots, cars, and so on. That is, there must be other profits. Unofficial.
Where did Anatolii Bondarenko get the money for his luxurious mansion near Cherkasy?
The fact that they definitely exist is confirmed by two interesting facts. In his declarations, Anatoly Bondarenko significantly underestimated the area of the estate from 770 meters to 429 meters. Obviously, in order to reduce the official costs for it, which he declared at the level of only 160 thousand US dollars, that is, 5 times lower than the minimum real cost of construction. Even a non-specialist in the real estate market will understand that it is impossible to build three houses from scratch for $160,000.
Second. Anatoliy Bondarenko, explaining to the journalists of the local publication "18000" where the money for the construction of a luxurious estate came from, answered the following: "This year, I sold property for close to UAH 15-18 million. Are you satisfied with such an answer?", then the mayor of Cherkas cut in and started to run away from the reporter. It is interesting that Valery Bondarenko expressed a completely different version of the origin of the funds for the "big construction", saying that this money was allegedly from her business.
But now it's not about that. In Bondarenko's latest declarations, significant profits from the sale of movable and immovable property are indeed indicated. Let's take a closer look at these trades. In 2023, the mayor sold his house with an area of 178.6 square meters in his native village of Lysyanka to Rustamyan Makedon Samvelovich for USD 150,000. The market price of such a house in this remote village reaches 41 thousand dollars, that is, the mayor of Cherkas "sold" the house to the buyer at a price 3.5 times higher than the market price, and the buyer overpaid him more than 100 thousand dollars.
But there is one but. Makedon Rustamyan is not an ordinary shopper from the street. He is an entrepreneur who "sits" firmly on city and state tenders in Cherkasy. According to data from the Spending.gov.ua portal, in 2017-2018, when Anatoly Bondarenko was already the mayor, Rustamyan received about 6 million UAH from the city budget for the repair of the city's streets without applying tender procedures just a few days after registering his FOP.
And in March 2023, exactly when Rustamyan bought the house of the mayor of Cherkassy, he registered "Euroroads" LLC, which already in the fall of 2023 became the only participant and winner in the auction of the Service of local highways in the Cherkasy region for the amount of UAH 16.9 million. How can we not mention here that buying a house at a price 3.5 times higher than the market price is very similar to a contractor's "kickback" for winning a non-competitive tender?
The fact that this is not the first time he bought property from the Cherkasy mayor's family at inflated prices indicates that this is far from an accident, and that Makedon Rustamyan is really not an accidental person in this respect. Back in October 2019, Rustamyan bought a 2010 Mercedes-Benz S500 car from the brother of the mayor Mykola Bondarenko, who at that time was the deputy mayor of Lysyanka, for UAH 1.34 million. The average price on the secondary market of such a car is about 700 thousand hryvnias, i.e. 2 times less. And according to his declaration, Mykola Bondarenko bought this car in 2018 for only 151,000 hryvnias, which is 9 times less than the price of the car sold to Rustamyan. Thus, the money that Rustamyan overpays for the purchase of the property of the Bondarenko family can more than likely be the same unofficial income of the mayor of Cherkassy in the form of "kickbacks" from tenders.
Another sign of the legalization of illegal funds of the mayor of Cherkassy is the monetary gifts he receives from his relatives. So, in 2023, Anatoly Bondarenko received $49,000 as a gift from his 72-year-old father-in-law Oleksandr Maistrovych, who does not have any shares in the business, and is probably an ordinary pensioner without clear sources for such income and gifts.
How the Mayor of Cherkasy Anatolii Bondarenko distributes multimillion-dollar tenders to his favorites
But if the story with Makedon Rustamyan was the only one that points to the enrichment of the mayor of Cherkassy at city tenders. There are a lot of them. Only on the basis of processed data in the mass media for the years while Anatoly Bondarenko was the mayor of Cherkassy, we counted more than 40 dubious tenders for a total amount of UAH 6.3 billion ($177 million), which have signs of enrichment.
It is clear that the city government of Cherkassy makes a lot of money feeding children in schools and kindergartens. As soon as Anatoly Bondarenko became the mayor, since 2016, the only provider of children's nutrition services in the city has become the LLC "Chestnut Plus". City council officials "started" it according to the following scheme: the company submitted the cheapest bid among other participants (where, according to the company's calculation, juice cost UAH 3 per liter, anchovies UAH 10 per kilogram, and so on), thanks to which it won the tender for providing schoolchildren with food for up to 4 years - until the end of Bondarenko's first mayoral term. But then, with additional agreements, the city council and "Kashtan-plus" increased the prices of products to above market prices.
Since then, the Cherkasy City Council has concluded up to two hundred agreements with this enterprise, making it essentially a monopolist on the children's food market in the city. One of the last agreements that "Kashtan-plus" LLC received in non-competitive bidding is an agreement for the supply of chicken fillet for kindergartens for UAH 38.78 million, which became the most expensive agreement in the whole country with the price of this product at UAH 220 per kilogram .
Koltekh-Trans company of Cherkasy mayor's ally Serhiy Kolesnichenko receives hundreds of millions of hryvnias from Cherkasy budget
Another company beloved by the Cherkasy city government is Koltech-Trans LLC of Serhiy Kolesnychenko, an associate of Anatoly Bondarenko from the "For the Future" party. His company regularly every year receives contracts from the city council for the laying of paving slabs, which begin to fall apart after a couple of months. This was the case, for example, with the laid tiles on Shevchenko Boulevard in 2016. The tiles laid on the Mytnytsia embankment in 2017 turned out to be shoddy. As the law enforcement officers discovered at the time, the contractor promised to use one tile produced by the Demetra plant, and in fact, a completely different tile produced by the Rayagrobudservice PE was found on the streets - cheaper and made of less quality concrete.
However, criminal proceedings on this matter did not stop the Cherkasy City Council and its head, Anatoly Bondarenko. In 2019, they again chose Koltech-Trans LLC to reconstruct the 700th anniversary square, to which they gave almost 5 million hryvnias. The price of one square meter was 833 hryvnias — it was the highest of the prices offered by other bidders, but the city council still chose its "favorite" hackneyed contractor as the winner, thus overpaying half a million hryvnias on this deal.
The reason is very simple: according to local media, after Anatoly Bondarenko became the mayor of Cherkassy, Oleksandr Karpenko, a business partner of his fellow party member, the head of the faction of the Batkivshchyna party in the city council, Roman Diskant (who is the business partner of the mayor's wife Valeria Bondarenko in LLC "Groupinvest Cherkasy", where they are co-founders together), founded the tile factory "S-PLYTT", from which, according to the investigation, they began to lay the streets of Cherkasy with defective tiles. Koltech-Trans, the city council's favorite contractor, with the help of a number of fictitious enterprises, overestimated the amount of repair work performed and the prices of construction materials, according to the decision of the Sosniv District Court of Cherkassy.
"I specially approached the workers in the evening who were laying these tiles and asked why they were laid so clumsily. People directly say that the tiles from the mayor's factory are all crooked, that is, they are of different sizes and they simply cannot lay them evenly," said Oleksandr Zgiblov, a member of the Cherkasy City Council.
To date, LLC "Koltech-Trans" has been on the "black list" of the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine since August 2023 as an enterprise that uses anti-competitive concerted actions when participating in tenders. But this does not prevent the Cherkasy City Council from continuing to give it contracts worth hundreds of millions of hryvnias. If in 2023 this company bid only UAH 22 million at tenders in Cherkasy, then in the incomplete year of 2024, according to Opendatabot, this amount reached almost UAH 349 million. Among them are contracts for the current repair of roads in Cherkasy for UAH 76 million, as well as for the repair of the sidewalk on Smilyanska Street for UAH 5.5 million.
The latest tender for UAH 86.4 million was won by Koltech-Trans LLC from the Department of Road Transport Infrastructure and Ecology of the Cherkasy City Council for the capital repair of Heroiv Kholodny Yaru street.
In addition, the mayor of Cherkassy "started" the enterprise "Koltech-Trans" of his associate in the party and for the contracts of the city KP "Cherkaske operational linear management of highways" for snow removal in winter. Moreover, the company's business is going so well that it has already started repairing buildings. Again, following a simplified procedure without competitive bidding, the Cherkasy City Council chose the same Koltech-Trans LLC as the executor of the overhaul of the shelter for displaced persons on Kobzarska Street in August 2022. The amount of the agreement at the start was UAH 18.17 million, but then the city council concluded an additional agreement, increasing the cost of the works by another UAH 6.3 million. At the same time, Serhiy Kolesnichenko broke all the deadlines for the work - instead of December 2022, the work was completed only in the summer of 2023.
Another favorite of the Cherkasy City Council when performing road repairs is the private enterprise "Dorstroy". During the years of Anatoly Bondarenko's tenure as mayor of Cherkassy, this enterprise received more than half a billion hryvnias from departments and offices of the city council for the repair of roads in the city.
Subordinates of the mayor of Cherkassy also give "their" people multimillion-dollar contracts for the landscaping of the city. For many years, the Tkachenkos, who own the company "Garden of Dreams", have been engaged in planting trees and flowers, as well as taking care of green spaces in the city. In the summer of 2022, the mayor of Cherkassy employed Serhii Tkachenko as the deputy director of the utility company "Directorate of Parks". Now the tenders of this KP for the landscaping of the city are regularly won by either Marina Tkachenko, the wife of the deputy director of the "Parks Directorate", or Roman Komlyk, who worked at their enterprise "Garden of Dreams". Roughly speaking, they order services from themselves, at the same time spending tens of millions of hryvnias from the budget every year.
Friends of the Mayor of Cherkasy: How Anatolii Bondarenko installs “his” people in the city council
But the Cherkas mayor does not only give multi-million dollar tenders to his people. He also gives his people positions in structural divisions of the Cherkasy City Council. Obviously, if there were faithful officials everywhere, ensuring silence and the implementation of the necessary decisions in the assimilation of budget funds.
Let's start with Hryhoriy Zaichko, who was appointed by Anatoliy Bondarenko as the director of Cherkasy Operational Line Administration of Highways. Hryhoriy Zaichko is a fellow villager of the mayor of Cherkassy, also from the village of Lysyanka. They are old friends, which Bondarenko himself does not publicly deny. Hryhoriy Zaichko's personal mobile number in the Getcontact application is associated with a number of signatures, including "Grysha Mayor Friend", "Grysha Assistant to the Mayor of Cherkas", "Grysha Bondarenko" and so on.
Even before his appointment as the head of the KP in 2019, Hryhoriy Zaichko gave the mayor of Cherkas for free use his 2015 MERCEDES-BENZ S 350 CDI car worth about 70 thousand dollars. Considering how the Cherkassy city council kindly at that time awarded tenders for the maintenance of residential buildings and the performance of repair work to his LLC "Prombud-Industria", it looks like "not a bribe, but a thank you."
"Prombud-Industria" was founded in 2016, just when Anatoly Bondarenko became the mayor of Cherkasy. The enterprise is engaged in the installation of water networks, heating and air conditioning systems. Literally immediately after its establishment, it received a contract for maintenance of water supply systems and cleaning services of inter-house territories of the Sosniv house maintenance service for the amount of UAH 4.3 million.
In 2018, the company of Mayor Bondarenko's friend once again provided services for cleaning the adjacent areas of residential buildings for the KP "Sosniv House Maintenance Service" of the Cherkasy City Council in the amount of UAH 7,930,572. In general, during the first years of Bondarenko's mayoralty, the newly created company of his friend Hryhoriy Zaichko received 71 tenders from the structural units of the Cherkasy City Council for a total amount of 42 million 726 thousand 777 hryvnias. Almost all but one of the tenders that Prombud-Industria LLC once won were received from subordinates of Cherkassy Mayor Anatoly Bondarenko. That is, the company was specially created for the implementation of budgetary tenders. The story of how two friends gambled away tens of millions of budget funds: one is the customer, the other is the executor.
The friendship between Bondarenko and Zaichko strengthened so much during the tenders that in 2022, Anatolii Bondarenko decided to give him a second chance to earn from the other side - from the side of the customer, appointing him first as the deputy director of KP Cheluash, and then six months later, without a competition, as the actual director. When Zaichko filled out his first declaration, it became clear: his practice at city tenders was successful for him. Two plots of land in an elite garden association in the village of Pidhirtsi near Kyiv, a house with an area of 180 square meters, bought in 2019, cash savings of 2 million UAH, 300 thousand dollars and 40 thousand euros. Such a wealthy person - and in some utility company for the deputy director's salary of UAH 14,000 per month. It looks weird, doesn't it?
But the mayor of Cherkas did not leave his friend in poverty and, appointing him as the director of the company, set Hryhoriy Zaichko's salary 600% higher than what he had as a deputy - in the amount of UAH 100,000 per month. But even this salary was hardly of interest to a person with monetary assets of 16 million in hryvnia equivalent. Most likely, he was more interested in the substantial budget of the utility company, which can be absorbed already from the position of the customer, which Zaichko began to do, buying salt for sprinkling roads at inflated prices of UAH 9,252 per ton or equipment from the Alfatex company of the odious deputy of the Poltava Regional Council , related to Russian business. Only in the first year of his tenure as the director of KP "Cheluash" Hryhoriy Zaichko "earned" seven court cases regarding failure to take measures to ensure road traffic safety and the proper quality of the road surface.
Cherkasy Mayor's drivers and gardener were appointed to city council without competition
He received the position of deputy head of the physical culture and sports department in the Department of Education and Humanitarian Policy of the Cherkassy City Council and the driver of the mayor of Cherkassy, Serhii Kryvosheya. According to the data of the Getcontact application, his personal mobile phone number is signed in the telephone books of subscribers as "Vodyla Bondarenko", "Sergei Voditel Valeria Bondarenko" and "Sergei Krivosheya Gbo Bondarenko".
Back in 2019, as the mayor's driver, without any civil service experience, Serhii Kryvosheya immediately received the position of deputy head of the archival department of the Department of Case Management and Legal Support of the Cherkasy City Council. Beautiful story, right? The driver became the head of the city council's lawyers. Why Anatoly Bondarenko needed Serhiy Kryvosheya there, and then in the department of physical culture and sports, is an open question. But the analysis of the declarations of the driver of the mayor of Cherkassy, who so quickly climbed the career ladder, demonstrates that Kryvosheya, as an employee of the city council, began to get rich just as quickly. If in 2018 he had only 50 thousand hryvnias in savings, today his capital is already 140 thousand hryvnias and 25 thousand US dollars.
Another driver of the mayor of Cherkassy, as well as his neighbor Anatoly Tsvitkovskyi, was also not left without a position in the city council. Tsvitkovsky and Anatoly Bondarenko are old friends, as evidenced by their joint photos taken at Tsvitkovsky's wedding. One of the photos was taken against the background of a Lexus LX570 car, registered to the mother of the mayor of Cherkas Bondarenko, Olena Kuprianivna, with an approximate value of 50,000 US dollars.
In the summer of 2018, Bondarenko appointed his driver to the position of chief specialist of the state architectural and construction control department, and from 2018 to the present, Tsvitkovskyi has been the head of the economic department of the Department of Economy and Development of the Cherkasy City Council. In 2018, Tsvitkovskyi took two cars from the Bondarenkos for free use: a 2011 LEXUS RX350 with an approximate cost of $25,000, the owner is the wife of the mayor Valery Bondarenko, the second is the already mentioned 2012 LEXUS LX570 car, registered to the mother of the mayor Olena Bondarenko . That is, Tsvitkovskyi is clearly a person close to the mayor's family.
Work in the city council brought Tsvitkovsky an apartment with an area of 72.4 square meters in a new building with a view of the Dnipro, the cost of which today can reach UAH 3 million, and a 2016 KIA SPORTAGE car, the approximate price of which today is almost 18 thousand dollars.
It is likely that Anatolii Bondarenko sent his friend to the economic department to "correctly" make purchases, because during his work he already managed to earn a court decision regarding the tender for cleaning services. Tsvitkovskyi, as the head of the tender committee, did not reject the FOP's tender offer, which did not meet the requirements of the tender documentation. In addition, in the tender announced by the Department of Economy and Development of the Cherkasy City Council for the amount of UAH 1.07 million, it was also revealed that Anatoliy Tsvitkovskyi, in violation of the current legislation, chose S.M. Shcherbak as the winner of the tender procurement.
Vladyslav Tsvitkovsky's wife is also an official of the city council, she is the deputy head of the department at the Center for the Provision of Administrative Services. But his father Mykhailo receives a slightly different profit from his son's friendship with the mayor. Mykhailo Vitaliyovych Tsvitkovskii built a commercial kiosk without permits in the very center of the city near the city council building. Instead of demolishing it, in 2023 the deputies offered to lease to Mykhailo without competition a plot of land under this kiosk. His own person.
But not the only drivers. He appointed Anatoly Bondarenko and his gardener and fellow villager Ruslan Lementar to the position of deputy head of the Inspection Department of the Cherkasy City Council. As in the case of the driver, without any experience in the civil service - immediately to the position of deputy head of the department.
Why are we sure that Ruslan Lementar was a gardener for the mayor of Cherkassy before joining the city council? Again, his mobile number in the Getcontact application is associated with the following subscriber signatures: Ruslan Bondarenko, Ruslan Tolya, Ruslan Bondarenko ' Co, Ruslan Sadovnyk Mera, Ruslan Rodych Mera. It is currently difficult to confirm Ruslan Lementary's family connection with the mayor of Cherkassy, but the fact that they both come from the same village of Lysyanka may indirectly indicate this.
Ruslan Lementar has a small house of 70 square meters in Lysyanka, and there he also has a plot of land of 0.2434 hectares. Before becoming an official of the Cherkasy City Council, Lementar's only income in 2023 was a salary of only 12,537 hryvnias, received from his mother's private enterprise, Tetyana Borysivna Lementar, which provides taxi services.
But at the same time, the mayor's gardener keeps 990,000 hryvnias and 100,000 dollars in cash at home. It is interesting, isn't it true - where did the gardener get such money? And one more point. In 2023, according to his declaration, Lementar received income from the alienation of some movable property in the amount of 60 thousand hryvnias from Rustamyan Makedon Samvelovich - the same person who bought a car and a house from the Bondarenko brothers at inflated prices.
That is, it looks like Ruslan Lementar is another person close to the mayor of Anatoly Bondarenko, who clearly participates in his corruption schemes and the legalization of his funds. Which confirms our hypothesis that the Cherkas mayor appoints his trusted people to leadership positions in the city council — and not so that they effectively manage departments and departments, because what efficiency can be expected from drivers and gardeners without management experience, but for some other matters, rather related to the issue of enriching the mayor.
How Cherkasy Mayor Anatoliy Bondarenko is taking over the city's land
And Anatoliy Bondarenko is getting rich not only on numerous tenders that the city council awards to the companies of the mayor's friends, but also on city land. It happens very simply: first, the city council makes a decision to provide land plots to citizens for free, and then the mayor or his relatives buy it from these citizens for pennies, as a result, they get at their disposal tasty pieces of city land that are worth a lot of money.
So, for example, on September 22, 2016, a year after Anatoliy Bondarenko became the mayor of Cherkassy, the city council gave a number of land plots in the elite Sosnivka microdistrict to several citizens free of charge at a price of 5-7 thousand dollars per hectare. In total, about 50 hectares of land, divided into 5 plots, were given.Among the people who received them were already known to us Hryhoriy Zaichko, a friend of the mayor whom he appointed as the head of Cheluash CP, as well as Serhiy Zayats.
Both received a plot of 0.1 hectares, located next to each other. Two months after the decision of the city council, both of them sold these plots not to anyone, but to the native brother of the city mayor, Mykola Bondarenko. And not at all at the market price: the price of the land purchase agreement between Serhii Zaits and Mykola Bondarenko was only $6,425. Thus, at least 100 thousand dollars ended up in the hands of the mayor's brother, if we count the real value of the land in this area at the lower market price.
The other two plots of 1,000 square meters each, which are also located close to the plots already owned by the mayor's brother, were given to Tetyana Tebyakina and Viktoriya Kritevych. On the same November 22, 2016, when the first two plots were purchased, Tatiana bought Victoria's plot. It is noteworthy that in the decision of the city council on allocating land to them, Tatyana's and Victoria's had the same identification number, which indicates their connection from the very beginning.
And what is interesting, as it became known from open sources, Tetyana Tebyakina turned out to be the aunt of Roman Budantsev, the deputy mayor of Anatoly Bondarenko. Nice, do you agree? Thus, 4,000 square meters of land ended up in the hands of the brother and aunt of the deputy mayor of Cherkassy. It is possible that the owner of the fifth plot - Mykola Gonchar - is also related to the mayor of Cherkassy, because the purchase and sale contracts for all 5 plots were drawn up on the same day, November 22, 2016, and by the same notary - Fishchuk S .AT.
That day was generally very successful for Anatoly Bondarenko, because on November 22, his mother, Olena Bondarenko, became the happy owner of two new apartments with an area of 64 square meters in the newly built residential complex "Family" in the Mytnytsia microdistrict. One apartment has an area of 143 square meters, the second - 64 square meters. Taking into account the approximate cost of a square meter in this building, the real estate purchased by the mayor's mother is worth at least 2 million hryvnias.
And this is only the tip of the iceberg. Because in general, according to Osint Global's calculations, Mayor Bondarenko, using his official position, contributed to the removal from the property of the city to the ownership or lease of his family and close entourage, as well as enterprises related to them, land plots with an area of almost 11 hectares, the market value of which is up to 1.75 million US dollars.
The city council calmly gives the relatives and friends of the mayor land plots in the best places without any objections. For example, "Hotey-Torg" LLC, which belongs to the sister of the mayor's wife, Kateryna Gerashchenko, received four plots of land from the city council in 2023 and 2024 for a 49-year lease. Natalia Burya, the business partner of Cherkassy mayor's wife, who, together with her, is a co-founder of Groupinvest Cherkasy LLC, received two plots. You can see more details about the amount of land removed from state ownership and the names of people from Anatoly Bondarenko's entourage who received it in the diagram below.
Despite all this - the legalization of large sums of funds of unofficial origin, the distribution of the most delicious tenders to companies connected with the mayor, the withdrawal and appropriation of a large amount of land, law enforcement agencies, strangely enough, still bypass Anatoly Bondarenko. The only time they paid attention to him was back in 2018, when the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office opened criminal proceedings regarding the illegal enrichment of the mayor of Cherkasy with an apartment, non-residential premises, a garage in Cherkasy and two cars worth 4.5 million hryvnias. But in connection with the then scandalous recognition as unconstitutional of Article 368-2 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, which provided for the criminal liability of officials for illegal enrichment, in March 2019 the criminal case against the mayor of Cherkassy was closed.
In any other civilized country, where citizens do not tolerate such brazen and open use of their official position by an official for personal enrichment, Anatoly Bondarenko would have been kicked out of his office a long time ago. Of all the heroes of the Osint Global investigations, the mayor of Cherkas seems to us to be the most audacious corruptor. One gets the impression that nothing prevents him from embezzling the budget money of the city and city lands, building estates for himself in front of the eyes of the citizens and still remaining at the same time not only in office, but also in principle free. We hope that this text will somehow change this situation.