How budget billions disappear in the Dnipropetrovsk region with the support of the President’s Office

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Юрий Голик, Валентин Резниченко

Despite the war and the lack of money for various purposes, there were resources for roads in the Dnipropetrovsk region. Since March, one private company has already received UAH 1.5 billion for these purposes, and thus a record has been set for financing the restoration of roads throughout Ukraine. We are talking about the Stroyinvest Engineering company, Radio Liberty reports with a link to the Schemes investigation.

Phenomenon

Journalists established that the co-owner of the company is closely connected with the head of the Dnepropetrovsk regional military administration, Valentin Reznichenko, with whom she regularly traveled abroad. It is the OVA headed by him who decides to whom, for what, and in what volumes to allocate budget funds.

“The other half of the company, which is assimilating billions during the active phase of the war, can be controlled through a close person by businessmen, the Dubinsky brothers, whom Ukraine’s partner state, the United States of America, has officially put on the wanted list on suspicion of financial fraud,” the article says.

“The phenomenal success of this company was that in three summer months it received a billion hryvnias for road repairs in the Dnipropetrovsk region. This is an anomalous bias compared to other Ukrainian regions,” said Nikolov, who was the first to publicly draw attention to this in his investigation on the Our Money website.

At the same time, the road infrastructure of the Dnipropetrovsk region did not receive significant damage, compared to other regions where active hostilities took place, analysts of the KSE Institute project “Russia will pay” say.

Used “Schemes”

Stroyinvest Engineering immediately resorts to several suspicious schemes.

First scheme. The key subcontractors that Stroyinvest cooperates with – and these are, in particular, BNM LLC, DZMK LLC, Maxi-Stroy Plus LLC – according to documents, do not purchase materials for roadworks in such volumes that they sell their Stroyinvest.

One of the examples is the BNM company with an authorized capital of 5,000 hryvnias. For the whole of 2022, she bought only 1300 tons of sand, crushed stone and crushed stone-sand mixture from her counterparties. But they sold almost a hundred times more of the same building materials – a total of more than 100 thousand tons.

Second scheme. This is a significant increase in the price of building materials on the way from the manufacturer to the state contract. The cost of materials is overestimated several times, and this affects the final cost of work.

Third scheme. Dubious subcontractors. Last year, the State Tax Service recognized Maxi-Stroy Plus as a “risk taxpayer”, in particular, because a company with millions in revenue (for example, more than UAH 300 million only during the period of a full-scale invasion) employs … 1 (one) human. Although then the court took the side of the firm.

Position of the Office of the President

To a request from journalists, the OP replied: “The office of the President of Ukraine is not the manager of local budget funds”, and that this issue “is within the competence of local authorities and relevant ministries.”

However, the investigators found out the connection between the OP and Valentin Reznichenko.

Yuriy Golik is a connection that makes the leader of the Dnipropetrovsk region much closer to the OP in terms of coordinating the “great recovery” than any leader of another region of Ukraine,” the article says.

Golik de jure does not have any official post, but de facto is deeply involved in these processes – in the media he is usually called the “curator” of the “Great Construction”. He himself describes himself as a “consultant” to the presidential project. At present, he is also integrated into the processes of restoring the infrastructure of Ukraine, in particular, he accompanies Kyrylo Tymoshenko during trips to the affected regions.