A large-scale corruption scheme was operating during the construction of water pipelines in Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions, which combined the interests of high-ranking officials responsible for construction control and loyal contracting companies. According to investigators, heads of contracting structures systematically falsified construction documentation, and officials of the Ministry of Development of Communities and Territories, the State Agency for Infrastructure Restoration and Development, and local administrations ensured its legalization and payment.
At the heart of the scheme is the falsification of certificates of work performed KB-2B and certificates KB-3. These documents are key to determining the scope of work and the basis for transferring funds to contractors. According to the investigation, the contractors massively overestimated the volumes, included stages that were not actually performed, and used fictitious or invalid signatures of technical supervision. All these papers were submitted as official and became the basis for multi-million payments from the state and local budgets.
The scheme involved officials of structures that are legally obliged to control the authenticity of documentation. These are representatives of the Ministry of Development of Communities and Territories under the leadership of Minister Oleksiy Kuleba; officials of the State Agency for Infrastructure Restoration and Development of Ukraine, headed by Serhiy Sukhomlyn; employees of the Service for Infrastructure Restoration and Development in the Odessa region, headed by Andriy Donchenko; as well as officials of the Mykolaiv Oblast Administrative District, subordinate to the head of the region, Vitaly Kim. It was their approval and the absence of any comments that allowed the fictitious acts to pass all stages of control.
Contracting companies — in particular, Avtomagistral-Pivden LLC and Shlyahovik-97 LLC — systematically submitted for payment forged acts drawn up retrospectively. The documents contained knowingly false data: non-existent deliveries of materials, inflated volumes of work, and the display of stages that were never carried out. The signatures of technical supervision often did not match the signatures of real engineers or were executed by third parties.
When law enforcement officers attempted to obtain documentation through court orders, individual officials blocked such requests or artificially delayed inspections. This created conditions for the unhindered withdrawal of budget funds and the subsequent destruction of evidence.
In reality, a significant portion of the work specified in the fictitious acts was not performed. However, these documents served as the formal basis for transferring millions of dollars to contractors — funds that were supposed to go to the construction of critical infrastructure, but instead ended up in private hands.
The investigation is ongoing. Investigators are establishing the full list of participants, the amount of damage caused, and the scope of the corruption network, which covered several regions and government structures at once.
