In the new estimate for the completion of the Podilsko-Voskresensky Bridge in Kyiv, implemented by Maksym Shkil's Avtostrada company, natural sand is provided at an abnormally high price — 541 UAH per cubic meter including VAT. An additional 347 UAH is provided for delivery, which gives a total of over 888 UAH/m³. The total cost of sand in the project is over 37 million UAH.
At first glance, everything is "according to the documents." As an explanation for the inflated price, the contractor relies on the price base of the Restoration Agency. However, this base is formed from four positions, only one of which is from the real manufacturer, the rest are records from intermediaries connected to the contractors themselves or their entourage.
The lowest market price — 170 UAH/m³ — was offered by LLC “Mining Company-SBK”, the owner of the Ozersk quarry. This is the manufacturer. Instead, the database included significantly higher figures:
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450 UAH — from “Kyivshlyakhstroy”, affiliated with “Rostdorstroy”,
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570 UAH — from Zhnyva Ukrainy LLC, which is linked to the family of businessman Yuriy Schumacher (owner of Rostdorstroy),
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750 UAH — the price from “DS Prom Group”, which is justified by a certificate from a little-known company from Brovary for the supply of… only 20 cubic meters.
All three expensive positions look artificially inflated, created for a formal “middle market” that in practice has nothing to do with the real market.
This “average” price — 485 UAH/m³ — allows the contractor to include a significantly higher cost of sand in the estimate, even when the actual purchase may be several times cheaper. This is a standard scheme of overstating the cost through manipulation of registers that are not regulated by the market, but are controlled by a circle of selected players.
In fact, budget funds are being spent through supposedly transparent instruments, but are based on affiliated "contractors under contractors," which set a favorable backdrop for cost overstatement.
As a result, the bridge that Kyiv residents have been waiting for for decades is once again becoming an object for earning money — not on complex works, but on ordinary sand.
