Kyivvodokanal is demanding that residents of the capital pay 246.5 million hryvnia in water debts. The company claims that these funds are needed to purchase reagents, electricity, and pay salaries. However, it was around the purchase of reagents that one of the latest scandals broke out.
On September 1, the Prosecutor General's Office reported that an organized group supplied the enterprise with counterfeit chemical reagents. The reports stated that the company had high-quality ferric chloride coagulant, but in reality, a cheap substitute was supplied that was unsuitable for water purification. The amount of damage was over UAH 3 million.
And this is not an isolated case. In March 2024, the deputy director of PrJSC "AK "Kyivvodokanal" "embezzled" almost half a million by purchasing asphalt concrete at inflated prices. He has already been suspected of official negligence.
According to the Kyiv Prosecutor's Office, nine criminal proceedings were opened against Kyivvodokanal employees in 2021–2023 alone, with a total amount of losses of at least UAH 67 million. The defendants include former company managers, department heads, and engineers, as well as Kyiv City State Administration officials and business partners.
In addition, in May 2024, the prosecutor's office reported new investigations for UAH 322 million. That is, this figure alone already exceeds the amount that Kyivvodokanal is currently trying to squeeze out of debtors.
For many years, Kyivvodokanal had a strange status: part of the shares were in the hands of private firms, which were associated with the entourage of former regional leader Serhiy Lyovochkin. Only in May 2024 did the Kyiv City Council decide to liquidate the PrJSC and create the Kyivvodokanal KP with an authorized capital of UAH 1.5 billion from the city budget.
However, legal confusion remains. According to YouControl, the KP was registered at the end of August 2024, but the PrJSC has not yet ceased operations. Formally, there are two structures, both with the same name and even with the same managers — Oleg Lysyuk and Iryna Komeleva.
Despite all these “reforms,” Kyiv residents regularly complain about the quality of the water. In March 2025, the water from the Desna River smelled like fish, which Kyivvodokanal explained as “seasonal algae growth.” In May, a scandal erupted with an outbreak of hepatitis A in Otradne: almost 90 people fell ill, including 38 children. Doctors suspected fecal water entering the system, but Kyivvodokanal denied it — they said that no abnormalities were found in the samples.
Experts, in particular the head of the Union of Consumers of Public Utilities Oleg Popenko, point to another problem: dozens of kilometers of water pipelines in Kyiv remain “unclaimed”. Vodokanal refuses to take them into account due to their emergency condition and the need for multi-million dollar investments. This creates chaos and actual irresponsibility for the quality of services.
The conclusion is obvious: Kyivvodokanal demands hundreds of millions of hryvnias from the capital's residents, but itself appears in criminal cases with the embezzlement of even larger sums. In such a situation, the question of "who owes whom" sounds rhetorical.
