Are the corruption schemes of Dmytro Tabachnyk working again in education?

Are the corruption schemes of Dmytro Tabachnyk working again in education?

Despite the fact that the "Party of Regions team" has long been out of power, as the Ukrainian people made their choice during the Revolution of Dignity, the "Party of Regions schemes" are still in operation, particularly in the field of education.

In 2020, the notorious member of the "Yanukovych team," regionalist Dmytro Tabachnyk, who has been living in Israel for a long time, managed to lobby for his godfather Yevhen Bazhenkov (who worked with Dmytro Tabachnyk at the Ministry of Education and Science in 2011-2012) for the position of Director of the Institute for Modernization of Educational Content.

Yevhen Bazhenkov, who had already gained significant "experience" in appropriating state property (in particular, according to investigative journalists, Mr. Bazhenkov, while serving as the director of the Social Insurance Fund, organized the removal of around 71 real estate objects from state ownership across Ukraine, for which he was dismissed in 2018), immediately "got to work."

With the arrival of Yevhen Bazhenkov, Dmytro Tabachnyk’s corruption schemes in state textbook procurement received a "second wind." It should be noted that the Institute for Modernization of Educational Content, unknown to the general public, plays a significant role in the production of textbooks for Ukrainian educational institutions funded by the state budget, as it is the institution that orders the printing of textbooks and, accordingly, manages budgetary funds. The professional "educator" and "candidate of sciences" (recently, the Ethics Committee of the National Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education officially confirmed the presence of plagiarism in Yevhen Bazhenkov’s dissertation) Yevhen Bazhenkov was well aware of this, which is why he so eagerly pursued this position. While Yevhen Bazhenkov may not be knowledgeable about education and science, he is well-versed in state procurement and cash flows.

The first thing Yevhen Bazhenkov did in his position was to block access for domestic publishers and author groups to obtain the stamp of approval from the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine for publishing textbooks for educational institutions. The skillful experts of the Institute started massively issuing remarks to all manuscripts, concluding that they could not be published under the Ministry of Education’s stamp. As a result, three publishers remained in the textbook procurement market: "Ranok," "Geneza," and "Osnova." Under the leadership of Yevhen Bazhenkov, the owners of these publishers, Viktor Kruhlov, Oleh Furman, and Oleh Kostenko, monopolized the domestic textbook market.

However, as the saying goes, appetite comes with eating. This year, Yevhen Bazhenkov and his company went even further. In a hurry, a certain publishing house "Atlant" was registered, which in August 2024 received state orders (without tender procedures) for printing textbooks worth a staggering 178 million hryvnias. A "suitable" printing house, LLC "PET," was immediately chosen for printing these textbooks. The owner is an Israeli citizen, Mykhailo Shifrin, who, according to journalists, currently resides at the same address in Israel as Dmytro Tabachnyk. As a result of Yevhen Bazhenkov’s "fruitful" work, the state and schoolchildren received textbooks from the "Atlant" publishing house at a hyper-inflated price of about 455 hryvnias per book, while other printers were ready to fulfill the order and ensure textbook prices at 135-215 hryvnias per book, i.e., twice as cheap as ordered by Mr. Bazhenkov.

As a result of several journalistic investigations, the police became interested in Yevhen Bazhenkov’s activities and initiated criminal proceedings under Part 5 of Article 191 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (appropriation, embezzlement of property, or seizure of it through abuse of official position).

We can state that Mr. Bazhenkov belongs to an absolutely omnivorous corrupt mafia, is part of the Party of Regions team, entrenched in his position, and plans to climb the career ladder to higher levels of public service for the appropriation of state funds on a significantly larger scale.

This is all against the backdrop of Yevhen Bazhenkov’s blatantly weak managerial abilities, who failed to streamline the work of the Institute for Modernization of Educational Content, where chaos, disorder, and incompetence have reigned for four years. Scandals regularly flare up in the information space (like textbooks for schoolchildren featuring a map of Ukraine without Crimea or images of soldiers in the uniform of the aggressor country, etc.).

All would be well, but the country is at war, and such managers are destroying it from within. So isn’t it time for the Minister of Education to draw powerful conclusions about this issue?

Author: Antonina Shevchenko