Sadovyi waited for “polite people”

For Lviv, this story began back in 2016 with a simple corruption scandal: officials of the executive committee of the Lviv City Council, headed by Mayor Andriy Sadovyi, sold a 23-hectare plot of land to investors for a future industrial park. The problem was that Lviv officials sold not their own land, but the land of the Ryasne-Rus village council.

Sold land plot on the cadastral map

In addition, Sadovyi sold the land to the Dutch investor CTP for UAH 52 million, while the normative monetary value of the land plot is UAH 140 million. You can read more about this deal from our colleagues at Lviv Portal, but let’s recall the most important thing: the purchase agreement between the Lviv City Council and City Park Lviv LLC bears the personal signature of Andriy Sadovyi.

The case was “leaked” from the very beginning

The criminal investigation into this transaction took a very long time. It was only in November 2019, after the change of power on Bankova Street and the renaming of the Presidential Administration into the Office, that prosecutors from the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office served Sadovyi and several of the mayor’s subordinates with suspicions of causing damage to citizens and the state in excess of UAH 93.5 million.

Initially, Sadovyi was even threatened with removal from office, as was later the case with Chernihiv Mayor Vladyslav Atroshenko, but… Time passed, and the case began to gather dust in the offices of the anti-corruption agencies for reasons known only to the leadership of the NABU and the SAPO. At the time, the SAPO was headed by Nazar Kholodnytskyi, whose actions were criticized by both the NABU and civil society anti-corruption organizations. The SAPO leadership of the time was famous for closing high-profile cases and slowing down investigations into a number of oligarchs. The media literally forgot about Sadovyi’s case. After his disgraceful resignation, Kholodnytskyi was hired as the third first deputy head of the Football Federation of Ukraine, one of the most corrupt structures in the country. He could often be seen in Lviv, as it is his hometown with an almost native mayor…

Simultaneously with the investigation of the criminal case against Sadovyi, a court case was underway to return the land plot sold by the mayor to its proper ownership. It began in the Economic Court of Lviv Oblast in the fall of 2019, immediately after Sadovyi was served with a notice of suspicion. And it was clear from the text of the statement of claim that the prosecutor’s office would “leak” the case. The Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office listed all the violations that were committed during this transaction:
– CitiPark Lviv LLC was established with the participation of a foreign legal entity, and therefore the consideration of the application and sale of land plots to this company is carried out only after obtaining the approval of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine (this is provided for by the ч. 6 Art. 129 of the Land Code of Ukraine);
– the land plot was not within the city limits of Lviv, and therefore the Lviv City Council had no authority to dispose of it;
– the procedure for drafting and approving a land management project for the allocation of land for the creation of an industrial park did not comply with the law;
– the sale of the land plot was carried out without following the competitive procedure;
– The management company of the industrial park could not acquire the land;
– the expert monetary valuation was conducted in violation of the law;
– the value of the land plot was underestimated.

However, all the evidence gathered was crossed out from the very beginning by the fact that prosecutors filed a lawsuit in the interests of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, although they should have done so in the interests of the Ryasno-Ruska village council, whose land Sadovyi sold.

This was noted by the judges of the Commercial Court of Lviv Region when they justified the dismissal of the claim in case No. 914/2333/19 in March 2021. Their decision to dismiss the claim was confirmed by the Western Commercial Court of Appeal in September 2021. And when the case reached the cassation instance, it turned out that the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office had simply missed the deadline for appeal, and therefore the Supreme Court refused to even consider the appeal in December 2021. Such “unfortunate coincidences” occur only in cases that are deliberately “leaked” or, as lawyers or law enforcement officers say, when a “case is sold.”

What about the criminal case against Sadovyi? After all, losing in a commercial court due to a deliberate mistake does not preclude criminal liability. Mayor Sadovyi actively used this case during the 2020 election campaign and presented himself as a sufferer and defender of the rights of foreign investors.
“The current events look more like a gift to Sadovyi. He can use them for a PR campaign, which will have a positive effect,” noted Professor Anatoliy Romaniuk, Doctor of Political Science.

However, the election campaign was successful for the mayor, but the criminal trail remained, which prevented him from cooperating with the same investors. Sadovyi solved this “problem” in a very trivial way. On the tenth day of the Russian army’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when there were no regions left that were not hit by Russian missiles, lawyer Oleksiy Shevchuk said that the NABU case against Sadovyi was closed. For Sadovyi, the war turned out to be an excellent background for closing the criminal case – Ukrainians were concerned with completely different issues.

And it so happened that the Russian army “saved” Sadovyi from criminal liability, and now he probably decided to repay his sponsor.

Russian trail leads from Kharkiv to Lviv

In June 2023, the tobacco company Philip Morris International announced that it was buying a site for the construction of its new plant near Lviv and investing $30 million in the project. Preparatory work will begin in July 2023, and production will start in the first quarter of 2024. The fact is that the Philip Morris factory in the Kharkiv region was closed by the company due to shelling by Russian troops immediately after the invasion of the Kharkiv region in February 2022. Since then, the factory has not resumed operations, and the company has transferred part of its production to competitors – to the Imperial Tobacco plant in Kyiv.

Philip Morris Ukraine CEO Maksym Barabash said that the site for the new plant was offered by the state office UkraineInvest. And it’s true, the office’s website has this land plot called “Ryasne-2-STR”.

Yes, this is exactly the land that Mayor Sadovyi took away from the residents of Ryasne and sold to City Park Lviv LLC on the cheap. Important information on the UkraineInvest website: the site is connected to all the necessary infrastructure – electricity (10 MW), gas supply, water supply and sewerage. However, the website does not state that all this infrastructure was built at the expense of budget funds. That is, at the expense of taxpayers’ money. According to preliminary estimates, about UAH 400 million was spent for this purpose.

International investor or international sponsor of war?

And now the main question is who is Sadovyi bringing to Lviv? International investor Philip Morris International? Numerous journalistic investigations have shown that this wording is completely inappropriate, as it is more correct to call Philip Morris International an international war sponsor and an accomplice of Russian terrorism. After all, Philip Morris, like a number of other tobacco giants, continues to operate in the Russian Federation and pay huge taxes to the budget of the aggressor country, which funds the Russian army, which has been killing Ukrainians on a massive scale since 2014, and especially since 2022.

In 2021, Philip Morris International was ranked fourth in the Forbes “Largest Foreign Companies in Russia-2022” ranking in terms of revenue. Its revenue amounted to RUB 392.9 billion.

Tobacco products under the Philip Morris brands (Parliament, Bond Street, Marlboro, L&M, Chesterfield, IQOS) continue to be sold in Russia and bring profits to the owners and huge taxes to the Russian budget. Earlier, Philip Morris International’s management announced that it would leave the Russian market by the end of 2022, but in February 2023, the company’s CEO Jacek Olczak told the Financial Times that they were staying.

The expected value of Philip Morris International’s assets in Russia is at least $2.5 billion. Given that Volkswagen and Renault have stopped operations in Russia and are exiting the market, Philip Morris is likely to rank first or second in terms of profits in the aggressor country in 2022 and continue to pay taxes to the Russian budget.

It was this “investor” who sponsored the murder of Ukrainians that Mayor Andriy Sadovyi decided to bring to Lviv.