How Komarnytskyi and Kandybor are trying to destroy Vitaliy Klychko’s rating

The "overseer" of construction in Kyiv, Denys Komarnytskyi, appointed the current director of the Department of Transport Infrastructure of the Kyiv City State Administration, Ruslan Kandybor, as the executor for the "development" of budget funds for construction and road repair in Kyiv. The latter involves the Turkish company with a corrupt reputation, "Onur," in all major capital projects.

In 2022, a major renovation of Khreshchatyk in Kyiv will begin, to be conducted by Ukraine’s renowned Turkish company Onur Construction International. At the end of last year, Kyivavtodor signed a contract with Onur worth 739.5 million hryvnias. However, for the Turkish company to win the tender for repairing the capital’s main street, interested parties conducted a whole special operation.

Positioning of Accomplices

After the decentralization reform in Ukraine, support from the central government is no longer enough, so Komarnytskyi quickly realized that he needed to place his people directly in the Kyiv City State Administration. The main target was Oleksandr Hustelyev - the former general director of Kyivavtodor and now a former deputy head of the Kyiv City State Administration.

Hustelyev resigned in November 2021. The formal reason was the delay in the construction of the Podilsko-Voskresenskyi Bridge. However, as they say, Hustelyev just began to be overly interested in how budget funds are being spent and disappearing.

A little earlier, on September 1, 2021, Ruslan Kandybor was appointed director of the Department of Transport Infrastructure of the Kyiv City State Administration (with a probationary period of two months). Previously little-known in the capital, the former Lviv official Kandybor became "popular" in 2018 after the then-head of the Lviv Regional State Administration, Oleh Synyutka, suggested to Ruslan that he "go and shoot himself."

The reason for the head of the region’s anger was Kandybor’s report on eliminating potholes on only 37 out of 8,000 kilometers of roads in the Lviv region. In addition, Synyutka reminded that Kandybor reported the installation of crash barriers on the region’s roads on a mandate dating back to December 3, 2016. The Regional State Administration head personally verified that no crash barriers were on the roads.

Also in Kandybor’s history is a suspicion of official negligence and the misuse of funds for road construction - at that time, the Kyiv Prosecutor’s Office was investigating, as they were checking, in addition to Lviv’s, 15 other regional road services. Due to artificially created debt, contractor organizations subsequently claimed inflation losses and 3% per annum from the Road Service through court proceedings, totaling over 4 million hryvnias.

The question of how a person with such a "brilliant" track record could win the "most honest" competition for the responsible position of director of the Department of Transport Infrastructure of the Kyiv City State Administration remained unanswered, if not for subsequent events. Indeed, in Kyiv, Ruslan began to operate with not just millions but billions of budget funds.

Kandybor’s Support Group

A member of the "young team" of the scandalous former mayor of Kyiv, Leonid Chernovetskyi, and a former co-chairman of his faction in the Kyiv City Council of the VI convocation, Denys Komarnytskyi is considered the "overseer" of all capital construction and more. Despite a long trail of criminal cases and court decisions behind him, the young man somehow managed to make arrangements with the new authorities of the country and, in recent years, launched active operations in Kyiv.

Here are just two characteristic episodes. According to MP Oleksandr Dubinskyi, in the summer of 2020, he submitted an application to the Head of NABU with evidence proving that Komarnytskyi laundered several billion hryvnias on contracts for the construction of the Podilsko-Voskresenskyi Bridge through his companies - Eco-Bud-Trade LLC and Express-K Private Enterprise. At the same time, journalist Yevhen Kuksin published on his YouTube channel information that Eco-Bud-Trade received over a billion hryvnias from the capital’s budget for constructing a section of the Ring Road less than two kilometers long. However, the quality of the work done for such a huge amount was, to put it mildly, unimpressive. Less than a month had passed since the ceremonial opening of the Ring Road, and already broken expansion joints and potholes were visible on the brand-new asphalt.

Turkish Business Miracle

"Onur" appeared in Ukraine in the mid-2000s, and by 2006 the Prosecutor General’s Office had opened a criminal case against the company. For example, Onur transferred half a million to two firms for gravel that was physically not supplied for the repair of the Kyiv-Odesa highway. The prosecution conducted three years’ worth of investigation into the misappropriation of state funds, but in the end, everything came to naught.

The Onur Group of companies, which includes Onur Construction International LLC and the Ukrainian representation Onur Taahhüt Taşimacilik Inşaat Ticaret Ve Sanayi Anonim Şirketi, is today among the top three largest contractors of Ukravtodor. From 2017 to April 2020, according to the ProZorro system, Onur Construction won tenders totaling 20.23 billion hryvnias, and Onur Taahhüt more 17.39 billion hryvnias.

According to the resource "Nashi Groshi", the company still engages in schemes with gravel. For example, Onur Construction purchases this raw material not from quarries but from its own company, Onur Taahhüt, at prices ranging from 700 to 1,300 hryvnias per ton. At the same time, Onur Taahhüt itself buys gravel from quarries for 200-450 hryvnias per ton.

Clearly, Onur is closely linked with the current Ukrainian authorities. Many episodes of its vigorous activity testify to this. In the spring of 2019, police in Poltava detained suspects in the illegal extraction of fertile soil over an area of 5.88 hectares, which was used by Onur during the repair of the Kyiv-Kharkiv-Dolzhanskyi highway. Law enforcement reported state damages amounting to 243.73 million hryvnias. But already in June, the State Bureau of Investigation opened a relevant case against police officers for the "illegal detention" of Onur employees.

According to "Nashi Groshi," Onur is a figure in dozens of criminal cases for misappropriation and embezzlement, including overpricing of performed work and saving on asphalt concrete, providing false tender data, forging documents, abuse of authority by officials, unauthorized sand extraction, water, and so on.

And now, a company with such a reputation, with Kandybor’s easy touch, obtained two large contracts at the end of last year — the reconstruction of Khreshchatyk and part of Stetsenko Street — from Palladin Avenue to Valeriy Marchenko Square. They plan to repair less than 4 kilometers of street, but the work is anticipated to be done over 7 years for almost 2.5 billion hryvnias.

Since, as shown by dozens of criminal cases, Onur does not intend to engage in actual construction, focusing on the "splitting" of budget funds, the quality of the work will correspond (as shown in the photos).

It seems that this is how the "updated" Khreshchatyk will look after Onur’s works. In such a case, it’s not hard to guess who will bear responsibility. It will not be Komarnytskyi, having no official position in the capital administration, nor Kandybor, who will pay at most with the chair of the director of the Department of Transport Infrastructure of the Kyiv City State Administration, nor even Onur - one more criminal case, so what?

But the main question is: does Kyiv need such a Khreshchatyk? It’s worth recalling that with the active support of the capital’s residents, two revolutions have already taken place in the city over the past 20 years. And in the event of overly vigorous activity by Kandybor and affiliated companies through which taxpayers’ money is being embezzled, it’s not hard to foresee mass protests. And not just under the building of the Kyiv City State Administration.