In the Volodarsky district of the Kyiv region, court proceedings to terminate land lease agreements for farmers in the village of Targan, forged by Mykola Kaplun, the largest local landlord, have not yet concluded, but local residents are already reporting new outrages. The Targan village council allocated land plots to ATO participants, handing out vegetable gardens that local farmers had cultivated for seventeen years to the soldiers. Meanwhile, vast reserve lands owned by the local government remained untouched. They are being used without any formalities by Kaplun's companies, who have enjoyed the favor of those in power since the rule of the Party of Regions and Viktor Yanukovych.
The Volodar district branch of Oleh Lyashko's Radical Party announced this to Kyiv authorities. They want to defend the rights of the villagers and hold those responsible accountable.
As it turns out, the Targansky village council of the Volodarsky district of the Kyiv region had been trying to allocate land to ATO participants for several months.
The local community actively resisted this, as the plots for the military personnel were selected on land that farmers had been cultivating for seventeen years. Back in the late 1990s, they had planted vegetable gardens there, which became a means of basic survival for many families in Targana. Now, according to local radicals, the local authorities have decided to deprive these people of their livelihoods with a single stroke of the pen.
At the same time, everyone knows that the village council has so-called reserve lands—plots of agricultural land that have not been granted for ownership, use, or lease, and therefore are not included in the process of economic exploitation. A logical solution, especially in the context of the acute conflict within the Targan community, would be to allocate some of this unclaimed land to the ATO participants.
However, the Targansky Village Council's reserve lands are only such on paper. In reality, local oligarch Nikolai Kaplun's agribusiness entities have long been operating on them, successfully developing formally undeveloped plots. Local residents are convinced that this is the reason for the inviolability of these lands: it's easier to extort the last penny from ordinary farmers than to encroach on the profits of an influential landowner in the area.
Earlier this year, a major land scandal erupted in Targana, with the main figure being the same Nikolai Kaplun.
It turns out that over the past few years, representatives of his company, OOO FK LTD, had been forging supplemental agreements to land leases for land shares leased by farmers to this company. The falsification technique was astonishingly primitive: in the supplemental agreements, which proposed a five-year lease extension, a one was added to the handwritten number five. The share owners were then astonished to discover that they had leased their plots for fifteen years.
Moreover, Nikolai Kaplun's firm's employees didn't even bother matching ink—as the victims' lawyer, Lesya Martsenyuk, told KV, on some of the contracts "extended" in this manner, the differences in the spelling of the numbers were obvious to the naked eye. And on some lease agreements, even the signatures of the landowners were forged.
Outraged farmers filed a lawsuit, demanding that the lease agreements be declared invalid. To date, the Volodarsky District Court and appellate courts have invalidated sixteen of the 40 agreements. For the remaining cases, expert examinations have been ordered, to be conducted by the Kyiv Institute of Forensic Medicine.
Of the sixteen cases won by the farmers, seven involved the annulment of the original lease agreements, and nine involved the annulment of supplementary agreements. Instead of enforcing the court rulings and returning the land to the owners, Nikolai Kaplun instructed his lawyers to pursue new grounds. For example, in the case of annulment of supplementary agreements, they cite Article 33 of the Law on Land Lease: purportedly, since the land share owners failed to notify the lessee of their refusal to renew the lease upon expiration, the extension of the leases occurred automatically. For the farmers, this means initiating new legal proceedings.
Nikolai Kaplun is also in no hurry to return plots to those owners with whom the court invalidated their original contracts. Farmers, in particular, are being persuaded to be patient until Kaplun's companies harvest their crops. However, the shrewd businessmen are unfazed by the fact that this violates not only common sense but also the law. "Since the use of the land is deemed illegal, the actions taken with it also become illegal. Accordingly, the harvest cannot belong to the disenfranchised tenant and must be returned to the rightful owner of the plot along with the land," explains Lesya Martsenyuk.
Since the peasants are unable to cultivate their plots, Nikolai Kaplun faces new lawsuits – with material claims for lost profits or incurred losses. However, until these are heard, the local magnate hopes to gain precious time.
To understand why Kaplun is so keen to stall for time, it's enough to look into his political past. He was elected to the Kyiv Regional Council as a member of the Strong Ukraine party, which never pursued an independent policy and, in 2012, merged with the ruling Party of Regions. Kaplun was part of the influential group of former Kyiv Oblast Governor Anatoliy Prysyazhnyuk, who is wanted on charges of abuse of office and embezzlement, along with Vitaliy Gudzenko, the leader of Strong Ukraine and Prysyazhnyuk's then deputy.
Now, Mr. Gudzenko, who has successfully changed his color, is a people's deputy from the Petro Poroshenko Bloc.
Until recently, BPP forces in the district were coordinated by another Strong Ukraine representative, Viktor Ostapchuk, the chairman of the Volodarsky District State Administration. Only recently did the bloc's leadership sideline the controversial official, fearing to nominate him for the upcoming regional council elections.
Incidentally, Mykola Kaplun's ties to Ostapchuk extend beyond ideological sympathies to business. After all, the head of the district state administration also holds Kaplun's land in the neighboring Lobachevsky village council. Clearly, under the new government, the controversial agro-industrialist is counting on successfully resolving his problems with local farmers through old political methods. The only question is whether influential figures in the presidential bloc will be willing to lobby for the interests of district princelings with tarnished reputations, who have long been slated for lustration.
Lyubomir Shramchuk, KyivVlast
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