War for some and millions for others: all roads lead to Andriy Sadovyi

A full-scale war has been going on in Ukraine for two years now, but while some people are doing their best to help the country, the army, and the frontline survive and win, others see the war as an opportunity to enrich themselves and try not to miss their “chance.”

Both a domestic and international scandal erupts involving Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi’s entourage and the mayor himself. The first concerns the embezzlement of funds from the city budget. The second is related to fraud with humanitarian aid. But first things first.

Bonuses bypassing the law

During a session of the Lviv City Council on May 25, MP Oleksiy Reznik read out an appeal to the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption. The deputy asks law enforcement officers to check the legality of systematic bonuses for deputy mayors without council decisions.

According to the Rules of Procedure, the issue of bonuses for deputy mayors should be considered and discussed at the plenary session of the Council at least once a quarter. In this case, the relevant deputy mayor must submit a report. It is also mandatory to adopt a resolution on rewarding or refusing to reward the relevant deputy mayor.

The documents of the Lviv City Council on bonuses for the deputy mayors of the Lviv City Council show that the deputies were awarded bonuses based on the mayor’s orders. The documents were signed personally by Andriy Sadovyi, contrary to the requirements of the Rules of Procedure. According to the deputies, such actions led to the embezzlement of funds from the city budget.

Thus, the deputy corps sees a corruption component in the mayor’s actions and appeals to the NACP to conduct an audit of the mayor’s activities. Lviv regarding the existence of a corruption offense.

Millions for charity or your pocket

The issue of humanitarian aid that Ukraine has been receiving since the beginning of the war is extremely relevant. After all, its volumes have decreased tenfold, and it is possible that this may be due to public investigations into humanitarian aid fraud.

During the first months of the war, the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office investigated 74 criminal cases related to the theft and trafficking of humanitarian aid. By the beginning of August, the number of criminal cases had increased to 247. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the distribution of humanitarian aid in Kyiv and Lviv region raises the most questions.

The former deputy mayor of Lviv, Andriy Sadovyi, and now a volunteer and “philanthropist” Hennadiy Vaskiv, was also caught up in a high-profile international scandal. Vaskiv worked for several years in the city council as part of Andriy Sadovyi’s team. Now his charity foundation All For Victory is being linked to multimillion-dollar fraud, which may involve Estonian MP Johanna-Maria Lehtme.

On March 7, 2022, Slava Ukraini (Glory to Ukraine), Estonia’s largest charitable organization, was established, and nine days later, on March 16, a charity concert was held to raise a phenomenal amount of 700,000 euros in one night. Many people supported the non-profit organization, headed by Johanna-Maria Lehtme, a member of the Estonian parliament.

During the course of its activities, the NGO Slava Ukrainu has received donations from Estonian residents totaling more than 6.5 million euros. Of these, 1.5 million were from the United States. Euros were transferred to IC Construction.

It was with the outbreak of a full-scale war in Ukraine that the commercial organization IC Construction began its active work. According to YouControl, IC Construction was registered in Lviv in the fall of 2021 as a commercial organization with the main activity of “organization of building construction”. With the outbreak of war, the company shifted its focus from construction to charity, while remaining commercial. Last year, the company’s sales revenue amounted to 41.7 million. UAH, or about 1 million. million euros, of which net profit amounted to 9.3 million euros. UAH, or about 250,000 euros.

“At the center of the scandal is the non-profit association All For Victory, known as the main partner of Slava Ukraini in Ukraine, as well as IC Construction, a company associated with the top management of All For Victory. Both organizations are related to former high-ranking officials As it turned out, the bulk of the money, more than 1 million euros, was transferred from the account of Slava Ukraini to the account of the private company IC Construction,” writes ERR with reference to the EPL.

According to the newspaper, the head of All For Victory is Hennadiy Vaskiv, a “close friend” of Johanna-Maria Lechtme, the executive director of Slava Ukraini, and the executive director of IC Construction, which has a very wide range of activities, is Roman Panasyuk, a former associate of Vaskiv in the Lviv city administration.

The active cooperation of the above-mentioned Lviv organizations and the Estonian foundation Slava Ukraini is evidenced by the large number of posts on social media and joint photos of Hennadii Vaskiv, Johanna-Maria Lehtme, and Roman Panasiuk.

It is important to note that Johanna-Maria Lehtme, who may be involved in the misuse of donations collected in Estonia for Ukraine through the NGO Slava Ukraini, was found guilty of embezzlement at her previous job. Anika Arras, the founder of the Miltton communication company, spoke about this. According to her, Lechtme submitted false expense documents while working for Arras on the EWA (European Women’s Academy) project, which resulted in the misuse of “four-digit euros.” But this incident was discovered later, when Lehtme was already working at Miltton, the weekly Eesti Ekspress writes.

Good cover

The main informant in the case of misappropriation of funds from the Slava Ukraini NGO, Oleksandr Chernov, told ETV that the cost of all the foundation’s operations was overstated, and its head Johanna-Maria Lechtme allegedly knew about it.

Oleksandr Chernov was a director of the Ukrainian company IC Construction, which invoiced the Estonian foundation Slava Ukraina for the purchase of goods and various services. Today, he does not hold this position and says that even at that time he was a nominal director, but in reality the company was run by its owner, Hennadiy Vaskiv, who is also the head of the All for Victory Foundation. It was with this foundation that the Estonian non-profit organization Glory to Ukraine worked closely. Chernov spoke about the “misappropriation” of money from the charity fund. According to him, each deal was conducted at an inflated price, and the difference allegedly ended up in the pockets of the beneficiaries.

“After March 17-18, I spoke with representatives of law enforcement agencies in Lviv. I told them about it. They wrote everything down. I told them that if they had hacked the computer, they knew everything, and I was in trouble. Well, they can just remove me. They said we would contact you. And they didn’t contact me. It’s strange for me. It’s just strange, because it’s Lviv. Most likely, there are great connections there,” he said in an interview with the Estonian Chernov told ERR.

Chernov’s story suggests that Vaskiv has a good cover, either in law enforcement or in the person of his former boss and Lviv mayor Andriy Sadovyi, because such multimillion-dollar schemes cannot go unnoticed.

This is not the first scandal involving Lviv residents: the Lviv customs office found contraband that was being imported into Ukraine under the guise of humanitarian aid. There have also been cases of extortion of kickbacks from volunteers for providing letters authorizing the passage of humanitarian aid across the customs border of Ukraine.

Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi himself sharply criticized international humanitarian organizations, which, according to him, were not sufficiently prepared in case of Russia’s armed invasion of Ukraine.

And Sadovyi cannot boast of correct behavior, despite his fourth term as mayor of Lviv. For example, last summer, at the first meeting of the city council after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Andriy Sadovyi grossly violated the rules of procedure. During the consideration of a resolution prohibiting the executive committee loyal to him from spending money from the local budget uncontrollably, Sadovyi put it to a vote without discussion or report.

Questions to the local authorities also arose because of the loan that the city of Lviv decided to take from the EBRD during the war. In December 2022, the city council decided to take out a €25 million loan as an emergency financial assistance to ensure the functioning of the city’s municipal infrastructure in the face of the military crisis.

However, this year, this decision, initiated by Sadovyi, caused a heated debate due to the allocation of UAH 35 million 400 thousand from the local budget to service the loan agreement concluded between Lviv and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). And the Finance and Business Planning Commission did not support the request of the Financial Policy Department of the Lviv City Council to allocate these funds. And the executive committee of the Lviv City Council, in violation of the law and bylaws, authorized the loan. And according to Article 42 of the Law of Ukraine “On Local Self-Government,” for such actions of the executive committee, deputies had to express no confidence in it and dissolve the executive committee of the Lviv City Council.

As the saying goes, one man’s war is another man’s mother. While some are defending our homeland at the cost of their lives, others are ungodly profiteering from people’s grief.