Former Zaporizhzhya mayor Anatoliy Kurtyev involved in a number of corruption schemes

On 24 April 2024, the Secretary of the Zaporizhzhya City Council, Anatoliy Kurtyev, who had been acting mayor for the past three years, asked the President to establish a city military administration in Zaporizhzhya. As the Blackboxosint project reports in its investigation, Kurtyev convinced the head of state that the head of the Zaporizhzhya regional military administration, Ivan Fedorov, was putting pressure on the city mayor’s office and trying to “single-handedly seize power in the city.”

At the same time, 38 deputies of the Zaporizhzhya City Council unanimously voted in favour of removing Kurtyev from the post of Secretary of the City Council and acting Mayor in a secret ballot.

Ivan Fedorov, the head of the ZRMA, falsely accuses me of involvement in illegal actions in the position of the Secretary of the Zaporizhzhya City Council. I am hereby informing you that Fedorov’s statements are untrue, and I am always ready for any inspections and cooperation with law enforcement agencies.
Kurtyev’s letter

Is it really groundless? Let’s look into it. The story goes that before becoming the head of Zaporizhzhya, Anatoliy Kurtyev, with his medical degree in paediatrics, worked as a nurse, then as a corpsman in the morgue, later as a doctor and deputy head of the forensic medical examination bureau, and from 2014 to 2016 as the head of the Levaniv cemetery. After that, he returned to the forensic department, where he was appointed head.

Back in 2015, Kurtyev tried to become a deputy of the city and regional councils from the Ukrom party, but failed. But in 2020, under the brand of the Servant of the People party, his dream came true - Kurtyev became not only a deputy, but was also elected secretary of the city council. When Mayor Volodymyr Buryak resigned in the spring of 2021, Anatoliy Kurtyev became acting mayor.

It is not even close to being a very lucrative place. According to Kurtyev’s declaration, for example, he received only UAH 565,000 in 2023 as mayor, an average of about UAH 47,000 per month.

Officially, Kurtyev is perhaps the poorest official in the country. According to his declaration, he owns only a small house of 29.7 square metres in an industrial area of Zaporizhzhya and a 42-square-metre apartment given to him by his mother in 2013. He also owns two plots of land: one in the village of Strohanivka measuring 2,500 square metres, and a larger plot of 7.81 hectares on the territory of the Botiyivka village council, which he inherited from his mother.

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NABU detectives discovered where the head of Zaporizhzhya actually lived in the summer of 2022 when they searched his apartment. Kurtyev rented an elite apartment in the centre of Zaporizhzhya at 52 Shkilna Street together with his assistant Vladyslav Pavlyuchenko.

His declaration did not include a Toyota Land Cruiser 200, which he used when he was head of the city council. This car belongs to Avtogosptsentr, which provides services to Zaporizhzhya City Council on a sublease basis. The only thing is that this sublease was paid for, most likely, not by Kurtyev, but by the city budget of Zaporizhzhya.

And there was no mention in the acting mayor’s declaration of the more than UAH 9 million that NABU detectives found in various forms of cash in Kurtiev’s apartment. Kurtyev’s assistant tried his best to convince law enforcement and the court that it was his money, but he could not prove how he could have legally obtained it.

In addition to the money, a bag of white powder was also found in the apartment of the acting mayor of Zaporizhzhya.

The NABU reasonably believes that the Secretary of Zaporizhzhya City Council stole humanitarian aid from international partners to residents of frontline Zaporizhzhya. Literally in the first weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, officials appropriated 22 sea containers, 389 railway cars and 220 trucks with humanitarian aid from Europe, which they then sold through business entities under their control.

It is very strange how Kurtyev served almost 2 more years as mayor of Zaporizhzhya after that, and how he was not convicted of this in 2022, when it became known. Criminal proceedings No. 52022000000000137, opened on 14 June 2022, were transferred by the NABU to the Main Investigation Department of the National Police at the end of 2023, which outraged local journalists, who said it looked like they had decided to bury the case in this way.

Despite the fact that, in addition to the theft of humanitarian aid, there are a number of other stories hanging over him that should have him in a pre-trial detention centre, not in the city council. And they are all related to the "drain" of budget funds in different directions.

Firstly, it is unknown where the UAH 1.2 million that Kurtev allocated for the repair of the basement went. The tender was held for the "right" company, Montazhni Systemy: when this company failed to win the tender the first time, Kurtyev cancelled it and announced a new one, which was won by the right person. Why is it unknown where they went? Because the signed agreement does not specify any addresses or what kind of work is to be done - somewhere and something, why should you know about it. As local journalists discovered, this was not the first such "phantom" contract - before that, Montazhnyi Systemy had already made repairs to the premises of a kindergarten that had long been out of business.

Secondly, in 2023, Kurtyev spent UAH 1 million on the production of signs with the inscription "Shelter" to Tetiana Petrun, an individual entrepreneur who had registered as a sole trader exactly three months before the Zaporizhzhya authorities, with obvious signs of corruption, awarded her the contract without bidding. At the same time, the mayor’s office spent money on paving in an industrial area in the Shevchenkivskyi district, on purchasing super expensive coffee for officials and on the functioning of "Zaporizhzhya" airport, which was not working during the war - 86 million annually, signed by Kurtyev, were "merged" to the idle airport.

Thirdly, Anatoliy Kurtyev also accumulated cash at home from the reconstruction of buildings damaged by Russian missile attacks. For example, 147.7 million hryvnias were spent on the reconstruction of an apartment building at 151 Sobornyi Avenue, with prices for materials and work overstated by at least 14 million hryvnias: paint strippers were bought 11 times more expensive than on the market, and crushed stone and aerated concrete blocks were almost twice as expensive. In his defence, Kurtyev claimed that "restoring a house is more expensive than new construction".

And, fourthly, another corruption scandal involving Anatoliy Kurtyev is the creation of the "Municipal Guard", for which the city council spent UAH 10 million, bought cars for it, but never obtained a security licence. Or maybe it did not plan to, the main thing is to use the budget funds.

In general, the entire period of Kurtyev’s rule over the Zaporizhzhya City Council during the war was a time when "not because of, but in spite of". Activists and deputies only had time to react to the "merger" of the city budget for corrupt, dubious deals that were completely inappropriate during the war. In response to Anatoliy Kurtyev’s arbitrariness and policy, some deputies even resigned their deputy powers early in protest: Mykola Bilyi did so in September 2023, followed by MP Oleksandr Konstantynov in December of the same year.

Complaints about Kurtyev’s activities were also filed by officials who were outraged that the mayor’s actions were directed against the interests of the Zaporizhzhya community. The deputies said that Kurtyev was deliberately blocking their work and preventing them from resolving important issues for the frontline city. Kurtyev’s months-long sabotage of the issue of financial support for the Armed Forces of Ukraine was particularly outrageous - the city council secretary clearly did not want to give money to a place where he would not be able to use it. However, it is equally likely that this sabotage had an ideological basis.

What connects Anatoliy Kurtyev, the former acting mayor of Zaporizhzhya, with the aggressor country of Russia?
The fact is that Anatoliy Kurtyev has two brothers. The first one, Viktor Kurtyev, was elected in 2010 as a deputy of the Partenitsky village council in Crimea from the Party of Regions. When the Russian Federation annexed the peninsula in 2014, Viktor Kurtyev did not hesitate for long and already in April 2014, during the first month of the illegal issuance of passports, he received Russian citizenship. It is likely that he still lives and works for the occupying country.

Kurtyev’s brother took out a Russian passport almost as soon as Russia annexed Crimea
The second brother of the former head of Zaporizhzhya, Oleksandr Kurtyev, lives in Ukraine, but regularly flaunts Soviet Union insignia on his social media, which also clearly characterises his political views. Anatoliy Kurtyev himself, while already serving as acting mayor of Zaporizhzhya, has repeatedly expressed his gratitude for the assistance of the foundation of pro-Russian oligarch Vadym Novynskyi, who is currently under sanctions and publicly sympathises with the Russians.