Oleg Oleksandrovych Kiper – since May 30, 2023, he has held the position of Head of the Odessa Regional Military Administration , Honored Lawyer of Ukraine, Candidate of Law. He was awarded the badges "For Conscientious Service in the Prosecutor's Office" of the III and II degrees.
During the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych, Oleg Kiper worked as Deputy Head of the Investigation Department of the Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine. After the Revolution of Dignity, on October 23, 2014, he was dismissed from the prosecutor's office as part of lustration.
In 2015, Oleg Kiper unsuccessfully ran for the Odessa City Council as a self-nominated candidate. After his release in 2016, he received a certificate of the right to practice law and founded the law association "Astreya OVD".
In November 2019, Kiper was registered in Kyiv as an individual entrepreneur in the field of law, but his activities were terminated. Since April 2019, he has been providing professional assistance to the Office of the President of Ukraine on law enforcement issues. By the beginning of 2020, he received an offer to become one of the freelance advisors to the head of the Office of the President, Andriy Yermak, on a voluntary basis. In this position, he also consulted on law enforcement issues.
On August 29, 2019, the trial of the case on the reinstatement of Oleh Kiper to his position, which was suspended in December 2014, was resumed. On September 11, 2019, the Kyiv District Administrative Court ruled that lustration was applied to Prosecutor Kiper without grounds, since his involvement in the usurpation of power by President Yanukovych was not proven. The court decided to immediately reinstate Kiper to the position of senior prosecutor of the Main Department for Supervision of Criminal Proceedings of the Prosecutor General's Office and to pay him UAH 805,000 in salary for forced absenteeism. In addition, the court ordered him to be removed from the register of lustrated persons of the Ministry of Justice.
On June 9, 2020, Oleg Kiper was appointed to the position of Deputy Prosecutor of Kyiv by order of the Prosecutor General. On July 27, 2020, Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova introduced Kiper to the staff of the metropolitan prosecutor's office as the new head.
While working as a prosecutor, Oleg Kiper was involved in a scandal when it became known that the then head of the Kyiv City Prosecutor's Office spent the New Year and Christmas holidays on vacation abroad, where he stayed for 10 days. He left Ukraine on December 29, 2022, across the Polish border and returned on January 8, 2023. This was reported by journalists of "Schemes".
At that time, Oleg Kiper confirmed that he was abroad on vacation, explaining this by "family circumstances", but refused to disclose the name of the country where he was vacationing, citing security considerations. He also said that one of the reasons was that his wife changed her Russian citizenship to Ukrainian in the summer of 2022.
"At the end of December 2022, due to family circumstances and the need to travel abroad, I submitted an application for leave with the possibility of traveling abroad. All documents confirming the right to travel were submitted to the competent authorities, and after their consideration, the appropriate permission was granted," said Kiper's response, provided to journalists by his press service.
However, “Schemes” found that Irina Kiper’s Russian passport had not been revoked as of early 2023. The journalists checked the validity of the document using the official service of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs and found that this passport remains valid. They also found her individual taxpayer number on the official website of the Federal Tax Service of Russia.
Despite the fact that journalists tried three times to find out in which country the chief prosecutor of Kyiv spent his vacation, he refused to answer, stating only that “the vacation was not a holiday or New Year's vacation.”.
When asked by journalists about the validity of his wife's Russian passport, Oleg Kiper replied that the Migration Service of Ukraine was dealing with this issue.
When journalists asked how the Migration Service of Ukraine could help Russian citizens renounce Russian citizenship, the head of the Kyiv prosecutor's office noted that this issue falls within the competence of the migration service, and advised them to contact them for clarification.
However, the regulation on the State Migration Service of Ukraine states that the agency deals with issues of admission to Ukrainian citizenship and termination of Ukrainian citizenship, but does not have tasks related to the withdrawal of citizenship of other countries.
In addition, the publication "Versii" found out that in 2005 the wife of the Kyiv prosecutor worked for the Russian organization "Publishing Center "Bulletin of Eurasia", which the special services of the aggressor country used to search for and attract "promising youth" to cooperation.
Declarations of Oleg Kiper
Kiper's last declaration, submitted for lustration and available online, is dated 2011. At that time, Kiper worked in the prosecutor's office of the Ivano-Frankivsk region and declared only a 2005 VAZ, a salary of 154.9 thousand hryvnias, and 15 thousand hryvnias of his wife's income. The family officially had no other income, real estate, or cars.
However, the official's declaration for 2019 shows that between 2015 and 2019, the newly appointed head of the metropolitan prosecutor's office, together with his wife, became owners of property worth at least 26.1 million hryvnias. According to the register of real estate rights, all of this property was acquired by purchase.
Kiper's salary for 2019 was 489.5 thousand hryvnias, with most of it coming from Ukrzaliznytsia, and only 52 thousand from his own bar association. The prosecutor's wife, Iryna Kiper, officially earned 4.4 million hryvnias from entrepreneurial activity. She owns two companies in Odessa that repair and service cars.
Iryna Kiper also lent almost 6 million hryvnias to one of the companies associated with her husband. In 2019, she borrowed 25 million hryvnias.
In addition, the family received 482.8 thousand hryvnias from the sale of property and a law firm. The Kiper family has almost 2.7 million hryvnias in accounts and cash, as well as several tens of thousands of euros and dollars.
In 2019, Oleg Kiper purchased two apartments worth a total of 8.6 million hryvnias in a business-class residential complex in the Pecherskyi district of Kyiv. His wife purchased another apartment in the same building for 8 million hryvnias. The Kipers also own three parking spaces worth a total of 2.6 million hryvnias.
In 2015, Iryna Kiper purchased an apartment for 1.8 million hryvnias in the Darnytskyi district of Kyiv. In addition, she has a number of real estate properties registered in Yaremche, Ivano-Frankivsk region. In 2016, she bought a land plot with a house for 2.3 million hryvnias. Later, she purchased another plot in Yaremche and received a cottage and unfinished apartments from the local authorities.
Iryna Kiper has also owned part of an apartment in Russia for over 18 years and has an apartment in Odessa.
Over the past three years, the couple has also purchased a Range Rover Sport, Toyota RAV4, and Toyota Camry, with a total declared value of 2.7 million hryvnias.
In addition, the declaration lists two types of cryptocurrency with a total value of 4.9 and 9.3 million hryvnias.
And it would be interesting to know whether the Kiper family began to enrich itself more quickly after Oleg Kiper was reinstated as a civil servant, but the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption classified Oleg Kiper's declarations for 2021, 2022, and 2023 due to mobilization.
This was reported by the press secretary of the head of the Odessa Regional Military Administration, Yulia Koltak, in a comment to the "Center for Public Investigations.".
“Oleg Kiper submitted declarations for 2021, 2022, and 2023 as the head of the Kyiv City Prosecutor's Office and as the head of the Odessa OVA. Due to the fact that Mr. Kiper was mobilized into the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the NACP does not publish his declarations in the public space. These are security measures during the war,” Koltak explained.
Journalists contacted the NACP with a request, but have not yet received a response.
It should be noted that the agency does not hide the declarations of all OVA heads. For example, the declaration of the head of the Mykolaiv OVA Vitaliy Kim was made public.
Oleg Kiper's activities at the Odessa OVA
Oleg Kiper's truly productive civil service began after his appointment as head of the Odessa Regional Military Administration on May 30, 2023.
And already in the summer of 2023, Oleg Kiper began to set up the prospects for enrichment in his new position.
Ukrainian grain exporters received over a billion dollars per month in 2023. During the year, Ukraine exported at least 50 million tons of agricultural products worth $12 billion.
The largest exporters were Kernel Trade, Nibulon, and Louis Dreyfus, giants of the agricultural market that traditionally dominate Ukraine. The main buyers of Ukrainian grain were Romania, Spain, and China.
However, data for Romania may be misleading, as many agricultural holdings sold grain to their own subsidiaries in this country, and further sales remain unknown to Ukrainian customs.
In addition, was exported by dubious companies that are likely fictitious. This grain was purchased for cash, which allowed taxes to be avoided.
In 2023, out of 16 million tons of wheat exported from Ukraine, 13.7 million tons were shipped through Odessa, which is 85%.
So, by managing grain export flows in the Odessa region, Oleg Kiper plays a key role in controlling almost all of Ukraine's grain exports.
On August 18, 2023, Oleg Kiper, Head of the Odessa Regional Military Administration, together with General Eduard Moskalev, Commander of the Odessa Operational-Strategic Group of Forces, issued joint order No. 19. It aimed to ensure financial discipline during martial law and combat shadow phenomena.
However, the essence of the order turned out to be less transparent. The first point of the document recommended that entrepreneurs submit customs declarations of the RR type (periodic declarations) 10 days before the actual loading of the cargo. This means that all customs invoices must be registered before the date of loading of the goods.
The RR declaration allows for the submission of information on multiple consignments of goods over a specified period. However, there was previously no requirement to submit such a declaration ten days prior to export.
With the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the volume of illegal grain exports increased significantly. Legal exporters lost up to 35% due to the lack of VAT refunds and currency fluctuations. While illegal contractors bought grain for cash and did not pay taxes.
Also, after the issuance of Order No. 19, 400 new companies appeared on the market. Some of them are parts of well-known agroholdings or have successful export experience. However, special attention was drawn to companies with suspicious fictitious activities, registered or having changed owners in 2023. Many of them do not have production facilities and have not been engaged in exports before.
In particular, about forty suspicious companies were identified , for example, one of these companies exported $40 million worth of grain in one day and has the same phone number as 139 other legal entities. Another company, which exported $20 million worth of grain, is owned by a psychologist from Uzbekistan, Alexander Raykov.
Some of these four hundred companies, according to information from Odessa Customs, may be related to Oleg Kiper, but the very fact of issuing Order No. 19 indicates Oleg Kiper's personal control over 85% of Ukraine's agricultural exports for his own benefit.
One possible destination for the opaque funds is the Bukovel resort, where Oleg Kiper's business partner is actively implementing several prestigious and expensive construction projects.
The Glacier project involves the construction of an apartment complex in five buildings on an area of 2.3 hectares in the east of Molodizhny Lake. The total area of over 800 apartments is 65.7 thousand sq. m. The first phase has already been completed and sold out.
Another large-scale project is “Escape City”, located on the site of the “Polki” parking lot near the ski lifts. It is planned to build 8 buildings on an area of 8 hectares, the first of which already has 360 apartments. The total cost of both projects may exceed $200 million, taking into account the costs of premium housing. The cost of a square meter here starts from $5 thousand.
The beneficiary of both projects is Vasyl Kavlak from Ivano-Frankivsk, whose identity still remains undisclosed. He owns the companies Glacier Hill and V.D. Group, which act as customers and contractors for the construction work, respectively. More public is his wife, Inessa Kavlak, with whom Oleg Kiper studied at the Odessa Law Academy.
Inessa Kavlak held the position of judge until 2018, and her declaration indicates her husband's significant business, including a tourist complex and numerous land plots in the village of Polyanytsya, which is part of the Bukovel resort. Among the assets are the WEST HILLS cottage town and the REST&SKI, GIRSKI and other hotel and recreational complexes.
Before the war, the Kiper family purchased a plot of land and built a house in Polyanytsia, registered to the wife of the head of the Odessa Oblast OVA, Iryna. Oleg Kiper is also Kavlak's business partner in two solar power plants in the Ivano-Frankivsk region.
Kiper and Kavlak have a complex network of connections. After lustration, Kiper founded the law firm Astraea OVD, where one of the partners was Vitaliy Ilchyshyn, the current deputy head of the Ivano-Frankivsk Regional State Administration. In 2022, the Regional State Administration transferred a land plot to Kavlak's firm for 49 years. Vitaliy Ilchyshyn purchased apartments in the Glacier residential complex at a significantly lower price than the market price.
Volodymyr Prodyvus, a former deputy and businessman from Vinnytsia, is also likely involved in the Bukovel projects. Prodyvus is a close friend of Volodymyr Ilchyshen, and his businesses are closely connected to the political and business elite. His influence on political decisions and connections with former partners reinforce his possible involvement in the development of Bukovel.
So, through complex political, business connections, and a lucrative position, Oleg Kiper and his partners are implementing major projects in the popular Carpathian resort.
