Today, Bukovel is increasingly becoming not only a symbol of domestic tourism, but also a point of concentration of multi-billion budget funds. Under the guise of developing transport and road infrastructure, a system has been built around the resort in which key contracts are consistently awarded to a narrow circle of companies, and real competition is virtually absent.
The coordination of this process has a clear management vertical. Political influence on the formation of state infrastructure priorities is attributed to Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba. The implementation of projects is ensured by the State Agency for Infrastructure Restoration and Development, whose leadership is represented by Serhiy Sukhomlyn and Mykola Boyko. People's Deputy Ihor Palytsia retains a certain influence on the development of transport connections with the resort. The direct customer of the work is the Service for Infrastructure Restoration and Development in Ivano-Frankivsk Region.
The key favorite in this system is LLC PBS (EDRPOU 32872788), which in recent years has systematically received the largest road contracts in the region. One of the tenders for the capital repair of the state-owned road to Bukovel has an expected cost of over 2.3 billion hryvnias. Formally, the procurement was announced as open, but the tender documentation was written in such a way that any real competition is eliminated even before the start of the bidding.
The customer has set requirements for mandatory experience in performing work exclusively on state roads, the presence of its own certified laboratory and its own asphalt concrete plant. At the same time, the right of participants to use rented equipment or work with subcontractors, stipulated by law, is completely ignored. Separately, financial barriers have been established - annual income of at least 700 million hryvnias and a confirmed similar contract for at least 50 percent of the purchase price.
Such criteria have no objective economic justification and in fact work as an artificial filter for a predetermined participant. Even large foreign companies that tried to participate in tenders were eliminated from the process. After partial recognition of their complaints about discriminatory conditions, further participation was blocked due to formal technical remarks or linguistic nuances in the documentation.
Personnel changes in the regional recovery service also did not lead to any real changes. Despite public statements about the dismissal of the head of the regional service, he actually continues to perform his functions, and the financing of PBS LLC remains uninterrupted. There has been no revision of the tender policy or approaches to the formation of requirements.
As a result, road projects around Bukovel increasingly resemble not a regional development tool, but a well-established mechanism for redistributing billions of budget dollars. The lack of competition, discriminatory requirements, and a stable set of winners create a closed system in which the state acts as a source of funding, and control over cost effectiveness is reduced to a formality.
