Having seized power, representatives of the All-Ukrainian Union "Svoboda" party confused state land with private property and launched a full-scale corruption network in the agricultural sector. The prosecutor's office, meanwhile, stubbornly ignores and refuses to acknowledge abuses of power in the agricultural sector, ignoring and shelving citizen complaints of extortion.
To begin, let us remind the reader that, in accordance with the distribution of government quotas among members of the now-defunct parliamentary coalition, the positions of Minister of Agrarian Policy and Food and Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources were filled by Svoboda members Igor Shvaika and Andriy Mokhnik. With the help of deputies from their own faction and their protégés in regional state administrations, they organized a full-scale corrupt system for squandering land, including land held by the State Reserve Fund.
The scheme works roughly as follows: Svoboda MPs—Ruslan Zelik, Ruslan Martsinkiv, and others—submit parliamentary requests regarding land use, and then regional state administrations change the designated use and, in exchange for a certain "gratitude," transfer land plots from the reserve fund to farmers, who then manage the strategic black soil reserves as they wish. Specifically, Zelik and Martsinkiv submitted such requests for plots in the Odesa, Kyiv, Rivne, Khmelnytskyi, Chernivtsi, and Chernihiv regions.
We are particularly interested in the Chernihiv region, where a specific and recent case of corruption involving the distribution of state land by the deputy head of the regional state administration, Konstantin Lubentsov, has been uncovered, although the prosecutor's office is in no hurry to investigate the matter. Lubentsov extorted $80 per hectare of allocated land from businessman Ivan Marakhonko from the village of Radomka in the Semenovsky district of the Chernihiv region.
Marakhonko himself contacted the prosecutor's office, where he stated that the figure had been drawn up for him by Lubentsov's assistant, although he later claimed that the deputy head of the regional state administration had done so himself. The farmer also stated that he needed the 166-hectare land for grazing cattle, as he owns the Druzhba Plus enterprise, which keeps a herd of 140 head.
According to Konstantin Lubentsov, who was forced to give a briefing under pressure from the press, neither he nor his assistant demanded any money (who would have doubted it?), but he did accidentally mention that after farmer Marakhonko, other people approached him with the same request for land, but they were also allegedly refused. It's worth emphasizing that the land that could have been given away for a bribe was precisely a plot of state reserve land, or, as agricultural professionals call it, "reserve land."
Interestingly, Lubentsov initially denied overseeing land issues at the Regional State Administration, but then opened up and admitted that he was involved in the region's agricultural sector; his formal title simply didn't include the prefix "Deputy for Agro-Industrial Complex."
And then, "Ostap got carried away," and our deputy governor of Chernihiv announced that he had previously served as an aide to Svoboda MP Ruslan Martsinkiv, and before his appointment, he headed the Chernihiv regional organization of the aforementioned party. Lubentsov also proudly explained that he was appointed to his current position through a Svoboda quota, and that his party affiliation allows him to travel to Kyiv to meet with the ministers of agriculture and ecology, "sit briefly in the reception room," and quickly resolve all issues there, which he does exclusively (again, who would doubt it?) in the interests of the residents of the Chernihiv region.
Farmer Marakhonko's claim of extortion has not yet been addressed, so Prosecutor's Truth has three questions:
When will a clear prosecutorial response be given to the complaint about Deputy Head of the Regional State Administration Lubentsov extorting a bribe from a farmer, or has it been sitting on the back burner for a long time?
Shouldn't the Prosecutor General's Office pay attention to the land fraud schemes being orchestrated by officials and Svoboda MPs at the national level?
— Will Oleh Tyahnybok give his fellow party members political, rather than legal, activity, given that in his program, the All-Ukrainian Union Svoboda advocated the preservation of state ownership of land?
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