Dniprovodokanal, a municipal water utility, paid the mayor's aide's company for billboard advertising when posters for the Ukrop party were displayed there, according to the website "CorruptUA."
On May 8, 2015, the public utility company Dniprovodokanal reportedly entered into an agreement with Art-Group LLC for an advertising campaign without a tender. The journalist discovered that the price was not specified in the contract, but it was determined on a monthly basis. The advertising posters were to feature the company's phone number, subscriber site phone numbers, and encourage users to register on the Dniprovodokanal website and pay for their services online.
Acting Director of Dniprovodokanal, Mikhail Ognevoy, called information about funding for one of the mayoral candidates' campaign ads "nonsense" and "complete nonsense." The company provided the journalist with a photo report showing that the paid billboards actually featured advertisements for the water utility.
"The 31 photos in the work completion reports for July and August are absolutely identical. The photos, taken in different months, show the same people walking and the same parked cars. One can only guess when they were taken: either in late August, when the noise began, or in July, when the job was entrusted to someone skilled in Photoshop," the author writes.
The journalist checked the addresses of the advertising media using the Yandex Panorama service. As of June 5, photos show that there were no ads on the billboards at the addresses of Pushkina-Gromova, Pushkina-Savchenko, and Chernyshevskogo-Ispolkomovskaya Streets. Olga Yudina also contacted Doors Consulting, which, together with the Communications Alliance of Ukraine, has been monitoring outdoor advertising in major cities since 2009, taking photographs and adding them to its database. As of June 25-29, some billboards displayed advertisements for the Ukrop party instead of water utility ads. Furthermore, the monitoring recorded the absence of some advertising media; it turned out that they had been installed later, although the report includes photographs showing that the ads had already been placed there.
Valeria Alekseeva is the director and owner of Art-Group; Nikolai Kharechko was listed as the previous owner. Both are known as leaders of the regional branch of the People's Order Party. In 2012-2013, Alekseeva headed the Olympus and I NGO, co-founded by Andriy Basko, an aide to the acting mayor of Dnipropetrovsk, Halyna Bulavka. Basko also owns his own advertising business, Alesan LLC, whose billboards featured advertising for the water utility. Art-Group did not own its own billboards and acted as an intermediary.
Art Group Director Valeria Alekseeva declined to comment on the situation. The acting director of the Dneprovodokanal municipal enterprise assured the journalist that the contract with the company had already been terminated.
Meanwhile, the publication "Nashi Groshi" reports that the information about mayoral candidate Borys Filatov being advertised on Dniprovodokanal billboards was revealed by Dnipropetrovsk City Council deputy Anzhelika Pilipenko, a former member of the Party of Regions faction. In April 2014, Pilipenko headed the new parliamentary group "Unity and Honor."
SKELET-info
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