{"id":383,"date":"2024-06-08T14:07:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-08T11:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/osintglobal.com\/?p=383"},"modified":"2024-10-22T16:04:27","modified_gmt":"2024-10-22T13:04:27","slug":"fiktyvna-reforma-yak-yuriy-bolokhovets-dyrektor-dp-lisy-ukrainy-ocholyv-koruptsiiu-i-nezakonnu-vyrubku-derev-u-lisovykh-hospodarstvakh-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/osintglobal.com\/en\/fiktyvna-reforma-yak-yuriy-bolokhovets-dyrektor-dp-lisy-ukrainy-ocholyv-koruptsiiu-i-nezakonnu-vyrubku-derev-u-lisovykh-hospodarstvakh-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Fictitious reform. How Yuriy Bolokhovets, Director of the State Enterprise \u201cForests of Ukraine,\u201d led corruption and illegal logging in forestry"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

How a fictitious forestry reform was carried out in Ukraine<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who is Yuriy Bolokhovets?<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analysis of Bolokhovets’ declarations: expenses are many times higher than income<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yuriy Bolokhovets’s land bank: the number of hectares owned by the companies of his mother, Anna Bolokhovets, and wife, Lyudmyla Bolokhovets<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How Yuriy Bolokhovets and partners \u201cprivatized\u201d a forest in Chernihiv region, forbidding local residents to enter it under threat of physical violence<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sources of income of Lyudmyla Bolokhovets, wife of Yuriy Bolokhovets<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How much did a resident of Bolokhivtsi earn at the Nizhyn Forestry tender?<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How Yuriy Bolokhovets illegally seized the forest and built a private house there<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How Yuriy Bolokhovets covered up corrupt officials Yuriy Soym, Vasyl Ivanina, Ruslan Sodolinsky, and the head of the Transcarpathian Forestry and Hunting Range Administration, Victoria Bilousova, as heads of forestry enterprises<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Examples of recorded illegal deforestation in 2023<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yuriy Bolokhovets lobbies the Cabinet of Ministers to lift environmental restrictions on sanitary deforestation<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Foresters declare millions in assets and are suspected of large-scale corruption<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who \u201ccovers\u201d Yuriy Bolokhovets<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Forests are being massively deforested in the Carpathians, roundwood is being smuggled to Europe, and forestry directors are getting rich. This is what you have been hearing in the news for years about Ukraine’s forestry industry, which is mired in corruption. Back in 2015, the government imposed a moratorium on the export of roundwood, but corrupt forestry officials and their pocket companies quickly got used to it – now wood is exported under the guise of firewood or smuggled under fake certificates, which only increases deforestation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In September 2022, the government decided to reform the forestry industry. However, as is often the case in Ukraine, the reform is only a loud word reform. All 158 Ukrainian forestry enterprises that conducted independent economic activities (deforestation and planting of new forests) were simply merged into a single state specialized enterprise \u201cForests of Ukraine<\/a>\u201d registered on October 26, 2022, and instead of 24 regional departments, 9 regional offices of forestry and hunting were created.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine created a Temporary Investigation Commission to investigate the actions of the State Forestry Agency of Ukraine, which is subordinated to the newly created State Enterprise \u201cForests of Ukraine\u201d and is responsible for forest accounting and forestry control. The result of this PIC’s work was the conclusion that the forestry industry is losing hundreds of billions of hryvnias. According to the MPs, the industry could bring in up to UAH 880 billion a year, but in 2022, only UAH 23.3 billion was earned, meaning that almost all of it is in the shadows. The responsibility for this was placed on the head of the State Forestry Agency, Yuriy Bolokhovets, who was dismissed from the post he had held since 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, Bolokhovets, who was criticized by MPs, was out of work for only a couple of weeks. Already on May 4, 2023, he was appointed\u2026 director of the newly created State Enterprise \u201cForests of Ukraine\u201d. That is, the person responsible for the failure of the industry is first punished by dismissal and then rewarded with an appointment to the \u201creformed\u201d body. And the essence of this has not changed: Bolokhovets was still in charge of 158 forestry enterprises as the head of the State Forestry Agency, and now he is the director of the company that includes all these forestry enterprises. The only difference is that now Bolokhovets is the director of one large forestry enterprise in his new position. Sounds like a good reform, doesn’t it? Now let’s take a closer look at its actual results and at Yuriy Bolokhovets himself, who brings them about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who is Yuriy Bolokhovets?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Yuriy Bolokhovets was born in 1982 in the village of Ivanhorod, Ichnia district, Chernihiv region. In 2005, he graduated from the Faculty of Forestry at the National Agrarian University and received a degree in forestry engineering. After working as a state inspector in the structures of the Ministry of Ecology and as a forestry engineer, in 2011 he took the position of director of the State Enterprise Pryluky Forestry, and a year later became director of the State Enterprise Nizhyn Forestry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Yurii Bolokhovets when he was in charge of the Nizhyn forestry. Photo:\u00a0<\/em>kyiinfo.com.ua<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Yurii Bolokhovets stayed in Nizhyn for eight years, but in 2020, his career began to take off. After a brief eight-month promotion to the head of the Chernihiv Regional Forestry and Hunting Department, Bolokhovets moved to the capital, where he was appointed deputy head of the State Agency of Forest Resources of Ukraine. A few months later, in February 2021, he became the head of the State Forestry Agency. You already know what happened next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is just one aspect of the life of the head of the Forests of Ukraine as a civil servant. There is another, parallel one. An official can’t live on his salary alone. Which, by the way, has only been high for the last year, and before that it was more than modest. From 2016 to 2022, Bolokhovets’s salary in various positions ranged from 15,500 UAH (2016) to 39,600 UAH (2022) per month. According to his declaration for 2023, as director of the newly created State Enterprise \u201cForests of Ukraine\u201d, he received 127 thousand 931 hryvnias per month. That is, the person who was accused of catastrophic inefficiency as head of the State Forestry Agency was actually not only punished, but rewarded with a 3-fold increase in his salary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analysis of Bolokhovets’ declarations: expenses are many times higher than income<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

However, let’s go back to Bolokhovets’ life before this \u201csweet\u201d appointment. He filed his first declaration<\/a> in 2017 for 2016, when he was the director of the state-owned enterprise Nizhyn Forestry. This is an interesting fact that for some reason the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption was not interested in at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At that time, Yuriy Bolokhovets declared only a 216-square-meter non-residential building in his native Ivangorod, Chernihiv Oblast, registered in the name of his wife, Liudmyla Bolokhovets, and an asset under construction – a 90-square-meter apartment in Nizhyn. The car is a 2013 Shkoda Octavia, the cost is \u201cunknown\u201d. It is also registered in his wife’s name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, with a salary of 186 thousand UAH for the year for Bolokhovets and only 6631 UAH for his wife, the couple declared savings of 300 thousand UAH, 20 thousand USD and another 100 thousand UAH Bolokhovets was able to borrow from an unknown person. In addition, they spent 1 million 731 thousand 600 hryvnias to buy an apartment in Nizhyn and 589 thousand hryvnias to renovate it. In other words, the Bolokhovets’ expenses for the year (not including daily living expenses) exceeded their income by 12 times. And yet they still had considerable savings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the declarations for the following years, the director of the Nizhyn forestry, Yuriy Bolokhovets, underwent no less metamorphosis. In the declaration for 2017<\/a>, his wife’s apartment of 48 square meters in Kyiv appears in the declaration without specifying its value and date of acquisition. And another 400 thousand hryvnias to the savings of 2016. Despite the fact that Bolokhovets’s salary for the year amounted to UAH 276 thousand, and his wife’s salary was only UAH 20 thousand per year. To accumulate 400 thousand UAH and an apartment in the capital, you clearly need to earn more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 2018 declaration<\/a> contains another interesting story: the Bolokhovets family in their native village of Ivangorod owns a 2500-square-meter plot of land and a 64-square-meter house worth only 25 thousand UAH. The dates of acquisition of ownership of the land and house are October 30 and 31, 2014. And they are registered in the name of the daughter of a Nizhyn forester, Sofia Bolokhovets, who was born in 2009, meaning that she was 5 years old at the time of acquisition of ownership, and 10 years old at the time Bolokhovets filled out the declaration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, both the land plot and the house acquired by Bolokhovets’s child in 2014 were not listed in his declarations for 2016 and 2017. But in 2018, they suddenly appeared. That is, the person deliberately concealed property from the NACP, for which he should have been punished by criminal proceedings. But for some reason, no one paid attention to Bolokhovets’ hidden property and hidden sources of income for years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bilokhovets and his wife also conceal how much money they currently spend on renting a large 140-square-meter apartment in Kyiv’s elite Boulevard of Fountains residential complex. They rent it from their fellow villager and business partner Andriy Reva (more about him below). According to real estate portals, the average rent for an apartment of this size in this residential complex is $4,000, or 160,000 hryvnias per month, which is almost the monthly salary of the chief forester of Ukraine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Andrii Reva rents this apartment to the official virtually for free. According to the Unified Register of Court Decisions, on December 1, 2022, Lyudmyla Bolokhovets entered into a loan agreement with Andrii Reva, under which the latter (who owned a bunch of luxury cars and real estate) borrowed USD 10 thousand from Bolokhovets’ wife with a repayment period of December 1, 2025. And to secure the fulfillment of the monetary obligation, Reva mortgaged the apartment, which is worth up to USD 1 million. Something very cunning. I wonder what the anti-corruption authorities think about such very profitable deals for the state schemer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yuriy Bolokhovets’s land bank: the number of hectares owned by the companies of his mother, Anna Bolokhovets, and wife, Lyudmyla Bolokhovets<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Where does the chief forester of Nizhyn get the money for apartments, repairs, and hundreds of thousands in savings with a more than modest official income? It seems that there are unofficial sources. A year after Yurii Bolokhovets became director of the Nizhyn Forestry State Enterprise, in 2013 his mother, a teacher at Ivangorod Secondary School, abruptly decided to become a businesswoman and founded the Ivangorodske Farm together with fellow villager Andrii Reva and then employee of the Main Department of the State Geocadastre in Chernihiv Oblast, Alla Proshukalo. Today, the farm owns and leases a land bank of 45 plots of 475 hectares located in Chernihiv Oblast. Of these, 22 plots are state-owned, located in the Nizhyn district and were acquired by the farm during the period when Yuriy Bolokhovets was director of the Nizhyn Forestry State Enterprise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2015, Yuriy Bolokhovets decided to expand his influence in the region and was elected to the Chernihiv Regional Council as a member of the Agrarian Party of Ukraine. At the same time, his wife Liudmyla Bolokhovets, together with the same Andriy Reva, founded Ivangorodske LLC, which has overtaken the farm of the same name by more than 3 times in terms of land. The company owns 415 land plots of private and communal property located in Ichnia and Borznyansky districts of Chernihiv region with a total area of 1424 hectares.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is not clear whether Alla Proshukalo, an employee of the Main Department of the State Geocadastre, or the chief forester of Nizhyn and the deputy of the regional council Yuriy Bolokhovets contributed to the acquisition of large land plots from the state, but there is a reason why the state authorities were so cooperative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As one example of how Bolokhovets’s wife’s company received land, almost 35 hectares of land on the territory of Plyskivka village council in Nizhyn district of Chernihiv region were transferred from state ownership in 2018 and ended up in the hands of Bolokhovets’s wife and his business partner Reva. In 2018, the Chernihiv-based StateGeoCadastre transferred a 34.8-hectare plot of land to the Plyskivka village council, which is protected by law because it contains archaeological sites, including ancient settlements of the Chernyakhiv culture of the third to fifth centuries AD, as well as a group of mounds of nomadic tribes of the second to first millennium BC. According to the Law of Ukraine \u201cOn Protection of Cultural Heritage,\u201d archaeological monuments and the land on which they are located can only be state-owned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, according<\/a> to the Unified State Court Register, officials of the StateGeoCadastre transferred the land to the village council, which in turn divided the land into two and held auctions in August 2021 to sell the right to lease it, which were won by Ivangorodske LLC, which soldered the plots and, according to our data, began to grow grain and corn on them, which it also sold for export. Is it possible to believe that officials would violate the law for no reason in favor of a member of the regional council and chief forester of Nizhyn, Yuriy Bolokhovets?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How Yuriy Bolokhovets and partners \u201cprivatized\u201d a forest in Chernihiv region, forbidding local residents to enter it under threat of physical violence<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In addition to these two companies, Yuriy Bolokhovets is involved in another one, Yeher Hunting and Fishing Enterprise LLC<\/a>, which he founded together with Mykhailo Reva, Andriy Reva’s father, back in 2008, when he was an ordinary forester at the Ichnia Rayagrolisnytsia subsidiary of Chernihivblagropolis. Today, he is another owner of a huge land bank of more than 20 thousand hectares in the Ichnia and Borznyanska communities of Chernihiv Oblast. This is not far from Kyiv, so, according to local reports, high ranking officials from the capital often go hunting for hares, foxes, wild boars or roes in these hunting grounds of the director of the State Enterprise \u201cForests of Ukraine\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among them is former Deputy Minister of Transport and Communications and MP of the 6th convocation from the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, Borys Shyanov, who was responsible for Chernihiv region in the faction. As the media previously reported<\/a>, it was thanks to Shyanov’s help and influence in the region that Yeher once received most of its best forest land from the Chernihiv Regional Council for a period of 25 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLocal residents even protested about this. However, the position of their forestry friends in the state corruption hierarchy worked here as well\u2026 They (Bolokhovets and Shiyanov – ed.) called the forest theirs and forbade local residents to fish or hunt there. Everyone was afraid to violate these prohibitions, as they could be physically abused by the guards,\u201d the media reports say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One such high-profile case occurred in 2011 with the personal involvement of Yuriy Bolokhovets. The local newspaper Vestnik Ch devoted an entire page to this story. Although it has now been removed from the newspaper’s official website, printed copies remain. Three residents of Chernihiv region, Mykola Dudka, Volodymyr Khrystiuk and Mykola Sichkar, lost their hunting dog on the territory of the lands of Yeher LLC. Their attempts to find it ended in a brutal beating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to the men, the owner of the farm, Mykhailo Reva, and the forester of the Pryluky Forestry and Hunting Enterprise, Yuriy Bolokhovets, together with fifty assistants, dragged them into a back room and beat them for half an hour, threatening to kill them. According to the newspaper, the violence was caused by the fact that the day before, these men had taken away a drunken ranger’s rifle, which he had used to threaten on the land, and handed it over to police officers. This provoked the anger of the owners of Yeher LLC, Reva and Bolokhovets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story then caused a considerable resonance, and the prosecutor’s office opened a criminal case. Reva and Bolokhovets denied any involvement in the beating of the hunters, and as a result, the case was hushed up – the applicants were reportedly intimidated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of this made it clear to the residents of Chernihiv region that it is better not to enter the forests given to MRB Yeher LLC. Meanwhile, local officials are giving more and more forests to Reva and Bolokhivets. The last time this happened was in September 2023, when, despite public outcry and resistance, the Chernihiv Regional Council, having considered the submission of the State Agency of Forest Resources of Ukraine dated September 1, 2023, and the petition of MRB Yeher LLC, decided to transfer the land of 4622 hectares to the latter free of charge for a period of 49 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHow can such decisions be made? The demands of the landowners are not taken into account. These forests were planted by our grandparents back in the days of the tsar. Why do we have to ask permission to walk through them?\u201d indignantly said<\/a> Mykhailo Movchan, a hunter from the village of Pryputni, Ichnia district.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yuriy Bolokhovets was a co-founder of Yeher until 2017, when he sold his 33% stake in the company to Artur Ananyan, director of Leonid Yurushev’s BV Zavod LLC. But a year before that, Bolokhovets had introduced his wife Lyudmyla as a signatory to Yeher, who was listed in the hunting enterprise in this role until 2023 and received a regular salary – a very modest 15,000 hryvnias a year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Structure of land assets owned by the Bolokhovets family<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Sources of income of Lyudmyla Bolokhovets, wife of Yuriy Bolokhovets<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Who knows what exactly influenced this, but since 2020, the thousands of hectares of land Bolokhovets has acquired have been bringing his wife substantial profits. In 2020, Liudmyla Bolokhovets received her first dividends in the amount of UAH 330 thousand from Ivangorodske LLC, which increased its sales revenue from UAH 17 million to UAH 50 million and showed a net profit of UAH 13 million (in 2019, it was only UAH 988 thousand). In 2021, Lyudmyla Bolokhovets’s dividends already amounted to UAH 660 thousand, in 2022 – again UAH 330 thousand, and UAH 722 thousand in 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Liudmyla Bolokhovets. Photo: Facebook<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In 2021, the wife of the then chairman of the State Forestry Agency also opened a sole proprietorship with the main activity of freight road transport. And the entrepreneur was immediately successful: while in the first year she earned UAH 451,675, in 2022 she already earned UAH 696,000, and in 2023 she earned UAH 1 million 535,000. She receives this income exclusively from the companies of her husband’s business partners, Mykhailo and Andrii Reva, or rather, their companies Garant Energo LLC, M.V. Invest LLC, Energo Smart LLC, Energostream PE and Garant Energy LLC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As soon as \u201cthings went up,\u201d from 2020 to 2023, Liudmyla Bolokhovets began to build up her personal land bank by buying more plots in the Chernihiv region. Over the past four years, she has acquired 13 land plots in the Ichnia district with a total area of 36 hectares, spending a total of $30,168 (about UAH 1.1 million) on them. Interestingly, the agreements were executed for a certain Tamara Ihorivna Tretiak, who acted on the basis of a power of attorney on behalf of Lyudmyla Bolokhovets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How much did a resident of Bolokhivtsi earn at the Nizhyn Forestry tender?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Tamara Tretiak is also a fellow villager from Bolokhivtsi. From 2007 to 2019, she practiced law, but in November 2016, she decided to switch to logging. It was with this KVED that she opened her sole proprietorship. And what do you think, in the tenders of which institution did she immediately start winning? That’s right, the state enterprise Nizhyn Forestry, which was then headed by Yurii Bolokhovets. In total, from 2017 to 2022, Tretiak won about UAH 33 million worth of procurement lots for the forestry, of which she received almost UAH 14 million when the forestry was managed by the current chief forester of Ukraine. Others were received when Nizhyn Forestry was headed by Bolokhovets’ godfather, Andriy Danko, according to some reports. So, consider it all one family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Tamara Tretiak receives tenders from Nizhyn Forestry<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It turns out that a fellow villager of the head of the forestry, who is a trustee of his family, abruptly quits the law and goes to the forestry, where she receives government orders worth tens of millions of hryvnias from the forestry controlled by Bolokhovets. It smacks of a possible scheme to embezzle public funds, doesn’t it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How Yuriy Bolokhovets illegally seized the forest and built a private house there<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

But that’s not all. His mother, Hanna Bolokhovets, also has a share in the Bolokhovets family land bank. She was a teacher at a village school all her life and became a co-owner of a farm and the owner of 3 land plots of more than 9 hectares, which she leases to her daughter-in-law’s Ivangorodske LLC. She also leases 4 more plots of communal property with an area of about 73 hectares.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, these tens of thousands of hectares were not enough for Bolokhovets’ family. Right now, the State Bureau of Investigation is dealing with criminal proceedings<\/a> opened on November 14, 2023, over the abuse of power by Yuriy Bolokhovets, CEO of the State Enterprise \u201cForests of Ukraine,\u201d and his family members, who, according to the investigation, illegally occupied a land plot and built a house on it. Of course, it was undeclared. Guess who uses this land plot? It is in permanent use of the State Enterprise \u201cForests of Ukraine\u201d, headed by Yuriy Bolokhovets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This land plot borders on another plot with cadastral number 7421784800:03:000:2040, which is used by Bolokhovets’ mother. Its intended purpose is for farming. However, as investigators found out, the family of the country’s chief forester had set up an artificial reservoir on this land plot, on the banks of which they installed temporary recreational facilities. Well, a kind of recreation center. Probably an illegal one. Bolokhovets fenced this land, along with 15 other plots, with a solid fence, making it impossible for unauthorized persons to access the area. This is how the family business turned out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is noteworthy that one of the articles of the Criminal Code of Ukraine under which the SBI opened this criminal proceeding is Article 209 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine \u201cLegalization (laundering) of the proceeds of crime\u201d. Judging by the court decisions in this case, the investigation has established that Yuriy Bolokhovets is likely to transfer the proceeds of crime to his wife’s foreign accounts opened in the jurisdictions of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, to which investigators have requested access from the judges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How Yuriy Bolokhovets covered up corrupt officials Yuriy Soym, Vasyl Ivanina, Ruslan Sodolinsky, and the head of the Transcarpathian Forestry and Hunting Range Administration, Victoria Bilousova, as heads of forestry enterprises<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Can we really expect a person like Yuriy Bolokhovets to reform the forestry industry, cleanse it of corruption and restore order in it as the head of the reformed State Enterprise \u201cForests of Ukraine\u201d? No, he won’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When he was still the head of the State Agency of Forest Resources, Yuriy Bolokhovets came to Zakarpattia, where he organized a demonstrative massacre<\/a> of four directors of local forestry enterprises who allegedly committed a lot of violations and were involved in corruption. However, local activists and journalists were surprised: it was the more or less invisible managers who were fired, but Bolokhovets ignored those who, as they say, have no place to be stigmatized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus, the head of Velyky Bychkiv Forestry, Yuriy Soyma<\/a> (who, like Bolokhovets, set up a business on state land) and the head of Mizhhiria Forestry, Vasyl Ivanina, who was detained for bribery<\/a>, were suspected by law enforcement agencies for bribery and embezzlement, as well as the head of Svalyava Forestry, Ruslan Sodolinsky<\/a>, who was a classmate of Yuriy Bolokhovets, and the head of the regional forestry and hunting department, Viktoria Bilousova.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was under Bilousova’s leadership that Trans P LLC, which operates as an intermediary between forestry enterprises and end buyers, began to operate in the region. According to the law, forestry enterprises are allowed to sell timber only through an auction. However, in Zakarpattia region, more than half of all timber sales by forestry enterprises are direct contracts with companies without auctions. This allows forestry enterprises to sell timber at low prices as part of corrupt collusion with companies, which then resell the timber at market prices, thus enriching themselves and the heads of forestry enterprises.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, Svalyava forestry sells beech at auction at a price of 4200 UAH per cubic meter, and under direct contracts – for 2000 UAH per cubic meter. Given that one forestry enterprise in Zakarpattia cuts down an average of 50 thousand cubic meters per year (only officially), if half of this volume is sold under direct contracts at a price that is 2 times cheaper, this amounts to 55 million UAH of lost money from only one of the 158 forestry enterprises in the country, which is probably what MPs said when presenting the findings of the temporary investigative commission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trans P LLC<\/a> is a company that is \u201clucky\u201d to buy timber from Transcarpathian forestry enterprises at a 2-fold lower price without participating in auctions. Its founders and owners are residents of Svaliava Mykhailo Livch and Vasyl Koshelya. Mykhailo Lyvch is the brother of Myroslava Lyvch, the manager of the Transcarpathian Regional Council. Before that, Myroslava worked as the head of the Svaliava District Council, and Victoria Bilousova was her secretary in the reception. Apparently, the work grew into a friendship, which later became a profitable cooperation, during which Bilousova ensures the loyalty of forestry enterprises to Trans P LLC, the brother of her former boss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Victoria Bilousova, chief forester of Transcarpathia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When journalists from the Go.ua investigation project asked<\/a> Bilousova, the head of the regional forestry and hunting department, about the prevalence of direct contracts, which allow Transcarpathian forestry enterprises to sell timber at half price, she vehemently denied it, saying it was not true. But after she was shown the documents confirming this, she made round eyes and began to make some uncertain excuses, talking about \u201cprogram failures.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The very fact that Bolokhovets defiantly left her in her position at the same time as he was dismissing other managers for corruption confirmed that he was well aware of what was happening and therefore was at least an accomplice. Moreover, given the fact that, according to investigative journalists, Bolokhovets forced forestry directors to sign resignation letters without specifying a date, it is likely that he was forming a pool of \u201cloyal\u201d forestry directors. And Bilousova, along with other corrupt foresters, was clearly among them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just like the former head of the Zhytomyr Regional Forestry Administration, Viktor Sakhniuk, who was accused<\/a> of flourishing shadow schemes in the forestry that brought him \u201cillegal\u201d income of tens of millions of hryvnias, and who, instead of being punished and dismissed for this, was transferred by Bolokhovets to the Kyiv office of the State Enterprise \u201cForests of Ukraine\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cToday, Bolokhovets (despite the war), as the head of the state enterprise, receives monthly payments from every forestry enterprise in Ukraine. The level of corruption is reaching such a scale that former director Viktor Sakhniuk brought Bolokhovets from 30 to 50 thousand dollars a month from Zhytomyr forestry alone. To understand: in the first quarter of the tragic year of 2022, Zhytomyr Forestry increased its sales by 10%. And these are only official figures. Recently, Sakhniuk was found guilty of massive fraud and collecting money from the directors of smaller forestry enterprises. The amount of damage to the state is estimated at hundreds of millions of hryvnias (and this is in a country at war). Colleagues from the Open Forest NGO said that Sakhniuk’s monthly income from shady schemes could reach up to $1.5 million. Bolokhivets definitely needs such craftsmen, and instead of being fired for schemes and large-scale corruption, Sakhniuk was promoted to become the head of staff at the capital office of the State Enterprise \u201cForests of Ukraine\u201d. And, according to a proven tradition, Bolokhovets’ godfather Ivan Sheremet went to Zhytomyr,\u201d wrote Iryna Hryb, a journalist and blogger who covers<\/a> corruption schemes at state-owned enterprises.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Yuriy Bolokhovets and Viktor Sakhnyuk. Photo: lenta.ua<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As in Zakarpattia, Zhytomyr region also has a thriving scheme<\/a> with direct contracts under which timber is sold for nothing. Sumy and Chernihiv foresters and others have been caught in this scheme. According<\/a> to Serhiy Tovkach, a representative of Verba-VB, the difference between the price of timber sold by forestry companies and its real value in Volyn alone reaches 2.5 million euros per month, which allows law enforcement and government officials to be corrupted with these funds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But nothing stops anyone when the top authorities in Kyiv clearly do not object, and even encourage and facilitate. This is evidenced by the fact that in November 2022, law enforcement officers searched the office and home of the head of the State Forestry Agency, Bolokhovets, and his subordinates, during which they discovered evidence of forged certificates for the export of illegally cut timber, which means that the timber was stolen from the state. The fish rots from the head.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Examples of recorded illegal deforestation in 2023<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The sale of timber at prices that are twice as low is only the tip of the iceberg of the corrupt empire of the chief forester of Ukraine. It is based on illegal deforestation by forestry workers. Law enforcement and public activists are only just managing to catch<\/a> them across the country, but everyone understands that only a small percentage of them are caught. Both before and after the \u201creform\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here are just a few recent examples. A group of entrepreneurs from Kyiv and Zhytomyr purchased<\/a> unmarked timber from forestry enterprises in Zhytomyr and other regions, delivered it to woodworking shops, manufactured timber products on an industrial scale, and illegally smuggled it across the customs border. The total amount of damage caused to the state is over UAH 17 million.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Forest products made from unmarked wood from forestry enterprises of Zhytomyr region Photo: Zhytomyr Regional Prosecutor’s Office<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In Kyiv region, according to the State Bureau of Investigation, in 2023, forestry workers illegally cut down 2500 trees for sale under the guise of \u201csanitary\u201d deforestation, causing losses of UAH 17 million. In a similar scheme, 7,000 trees were cut down on an area of 14 hectares in Vinnytsia region, causing losses of UAH 53 million. For several years now, civic activists have been fighting<\/a> illegal deforestation in the Shostka district of Sumy region. There are hundreds more stories to tell here, but every Ukrainian already knows that forests have been illegally deforested for years, and it does not stop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Volodymyr Boreiko, an ecologist and director of the Kyiv Ecological and Cultural Center, over the past 15 years, deforestation in Ukraine has destroyed 800,000 hectares of forest, which is 7.2% of the total forest area and is approximately the size of the Chernivtsi region. And this process is only accelerating: in May-July 2022, 169% of the forest area was cut down in Odesa region, 126% in Chernivtsi region, and 117% in Vinnytsia region compared to the same period in 2021. That is, forestry enterprises are constantly increasing timber harvesting from year to year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And this is understandable: more wood means more money. \u201cThe forestry enterprises are in a catastrophic situation, they are subject to tribute, they have to transfer about 30% of their revenue to the State Enterprise \u201cForests of Ukraine\u201d. So now they will either collapse or have to cut down the forest on a massive scale and illegally in order to survive,\u201d the environmentalist notes<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yuriy Bolokhovets lobbies the Cabinet of Ministers to lift environmental restrictions on sanitary deforestation<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, Ukraine’s chief forester, Yuriy Bolokhovets, is trying to push through the Cabinet of Ministers a resolution he developed on \u201cSome issues of logging in the forests of Ukraine<\/a>,\u201d which provides for the almost complete abolition of environmental restrictions on sanitary felling, namely, to allow clear sanitary felling in recreational areas of national parks, in the forests of the Carpathians, where it was previously prohibited, and to allow cutting down trees important for biodiversity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Foresters have already tried to push through similar changes<\/a> in 2022. Back then, the public actively opposed them, and the Ministry of Ecology received several hundred appeals from citizens, which is why it refused to introduce them. However, sanitary felling is an opportunity to cut down trees without any restrictions, so Bolokhovets does not stop, and, according to the ecologist, in the manner of the hoodlums of the bad 90s, he is trying to break the leadership of the Ministry of Environment of Ukraine on the knee so that it will agree to his draft resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers on tightening tree felling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSo far, the Ministry of Environment is holding out. In response, Bolokhovets began to block the creation of new protected areas,\u201d says Boreiko. \u201dWhy increase deforestation in an already treeless Ukraine, when even before the war, about 30% of the wood in Ukraine was cut without any documents. Accordingly, no taxes for the harvesting and sale of such wood went to the budget. The process of selling \u201cwhite\u201d timber remains thoroughly corrupt (low prices, kickbacks, etc.), which is also not very profitable for the state. Isn’t it more logical to pay maximum attention to transparency in times of war? To make the wood that is already being cut \u201cwhite\u201d rather than focusing only on a serious increase in logging?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Foresters declare millions in assets and are suspected of large-scale corruption<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

But then where do we get the excess profits that flow from Ukrainian forests into millions of dollars in the pockets of officials of the State Enterprise \u201cForests of Ukraine\u201d? And who would give them up? Just recently, Vitalii Sukhovych, former deputy director of the Polissia Forestry Office of the State Enterprise \u201cForests of Ukraine\u201d and a member of the Rivne Regional Council, revealed<\/a> his millions, when more than $4 million in cash<\/a>, expensive watches, gold coins and bars were found and seized during searches. Of course, they were undeclared. As well as three expensive foreign cars – Audi Q8, Mercedes-Benz GLE 350e, BMW X5 and four plots of land in Rivne, where he built cottages (in general, building recreation centers in the forest on seized plots is a trend among Ukrainian foresters – the chief forester of Zhytomyr region Sakhniuk did the same<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Searches in the house of Vitaliy Sukhovych, deputy head of the Polissia office of the Forests of Ukraine. Photo: oboz.ua<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From 2009 to 2017, Sukhovych was the head of the state enterprise Vysotske Forestry. From June 2017 to January 2023, he served as the head of the Rivne Regional Forestry and Hunting Department. And as soon as the State Enterprise \u201cForests of Ukraine\u201d was formed, Yuriy Bolokhovets gladly \u201ctook\u201d this valuable personnel as the deputy head of the Polissya office. Just imagine what the head of this office is doing there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is all despite the fact that in the \u201creformed\u201d \u201cForests of Ukraine\u201d the salaries of managers sometimes exceed the salary of the president of the country by 12 times! In other words, the logic of \u201cpay a normal salary and they won’t steal\u201d does not work in the forestry industry at all, because when you have a resource at your disposal that can and does bring not just hundreds of thousands or even millions of hryvnias in salary, but tens of millions of dollars, should you expect honesty and integrity from these people?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, the executive director of State Enterprise “Lisa Ukrainy” Ihor Lytsur received 6.7 million hryvnias<\/a> for the year last year, i.e. 563 thousand hryvnias per month. Oleksandr Kvatyrko, director of the Polissky Forestry Office, received a salary of 4.1 million hryvnias for 2023. The head of the Southern Forestry Office, Oleksandr Hrytsai, who is suspected of laundering and embezzling UAH 15 million as the director of one of the Volyn forest farms, was paid UAH 3.5 million in salary last year. That is, with the “reform”, the heads of Ukrainian forests turned into legal hryvnia millionaires. But can a person who has been doing it all his life before the “reform” stop stealing? After all, we can see that Yuriy Bolokhovets in the State Enterprise “Forests of Ukraine” recruited a team exclusively from people who had previously been involved in corruption in Ukrainian forest farms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who “crushes” Yuri Bolokhovets<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

How was it possible in common sense, having all this information, to appoint Yury Bolokhovets as the head of all forest farms in the country as part of the “reform” of the forestry industry? And still not release him? The answer here can be only one – the one who appointed and holds him is not interested in real reform and bringing order, but in the continuation of shameful corrupt practices in the forest industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SE “Forests of Ukraine” and the State Forest Resources Agency are subordinate to the Cabinet of Ministers, namely the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources. An interesting observation: Yuriy Bolokhovets joined the State Forestry Agency in July 2020 \u2014 exactly when Ruslan Strilets, who today heads this ministry, was appointed deputy minister of ecology in the same month. It was Ruslan Strilets who initiated the creation of “Forests of Ukraine”, where he appointed Yuri Bolokhovets, who was criticized by people’s deputies, to be the head, and who was charged with the responsibility for the forest industry being in the shadows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources Ruslan Strilets and General Director of State Enterprise “Forests of Ukraine” Yuriy Bolokhovets<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It is Ruslan Strilets who can and should release the “forest tycoon” Bolokhovets and start real reforms in the industry, the result of which should be billions of hryvnias in the budget, so necessary for defense against the occupiers, but which today settle in the pockets of forest industry officials. However, Sagittarius demonstratively does not do this, instead engaging in eye candy, which he calls reform. Turns out, interested in something else. We hope that then the anti-corruption law enforcement agencies will take care of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In April 2023, Yuriy Bolokhovets was dismissed from the post of Head of the State Forestry Agency due to large-scale corruption fraud worth hundreds of billions of hryvnias, but in May 2023 he headed a new structure that united all forestry enterprises in Ukraine. Bolokhovets, with the help of his family, created a farm with a land bank of more than 1900 hectares, including land with a protected status. Thanks to Bolokhovets’s protection, corrupt officials Yuriy Soyma, Vasyl Ivanina, Ruslan Sodolinsky and the head of the Transcarpathian Forestry and Hunting Department, Viktoriia Bilousova, were appointed as heads of forestry enterprises.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":384,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-publichni-rozsliduvannya"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/osintglobal.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/osintglobal.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/osintglobal.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/osintglobal.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/osintglobal.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/osintglobal.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":742,"href":"https:\/\/osintglobal.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383\/revisions\/742"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/osintglobal.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/osintglobal.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/osintglobal.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/osintglobal.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}