In Transcarpathia, OPFL MP Kaskiv forces entrepreneurs to sell land for ski resort, "servant of people" Arakhamia supports project - media. VIDEO
In the course of the investigation, journalists found that Vladyslav Kaskiv, a deputy of the Zakarpattia Regional Council from the OPFL, was trying to "take away" land plots from local entrepreneurs in the village of Pylypets in Zakarpattia for the construction of a ski resort. In particular, the owner of the "Berloga" hotel, Ivan Borychko, reported the pressure. In addition, "Servant of the People" MP David Arakhamia visited the site where the resort is planned, saying that he was investigating an investment case.
This is stated in the investigation of the hromadske "Seize" the Carpathians: business lessons from OPFL and Arakhamia", Censor.NET reports.
"I'm not engaged in reputation management," is how David Arakhamia, head of the "Servant of the People" faction, explained to journalists his joint trip with Vladyslav Kaskiv, a current member of the Zakarpattia Regional Council from the banned OPFL party, to the village of Pylypets in Zakarpattia. The idea of the President's Office to build a new ski resort there was not stopped by the full-scale invasion or the ambiguous biography of the key beneficiary of this project.
Who is Kaskiv and what does an Austrian investor have to do with it?
July 2020. President Zelenskyy's office, headed by Andrii Yermak, discussed the creation of a high-altitude all-season sports and tourism cluster called "Borzhava". The most distinguished guest who presented the programme was Austrian Gernot Leitner. They discussed the construction of ski lifts, hotel and restaurant complexes and other tourist entertainment facilities in the village of Pylypets, Zakarpattia region, and the surrounding villages. And if after the outbreak of the Great War, the OP stopped talking about it publicly, the grandiose idea itself did not disappear, but went underground. However, it turned out that the Austrian company was just a screen. The beneficiary of this idea is none other than Vladyslav Kaskiv, a deputy of the Transcarpathian Regional Council from the OPFL.
In March 2014, Kaskiv resigned from the State Investment Project and moved to Austria, and in February 2015, he became the head of the investment company Ozario Holdings. Prior to him, Peter Jandl, a member of the supervisory boards of Dmytro Firtash's companies, was the director. Although Ozario Holdings has now been liquidated, it was registered in Vienna, at the same address as Yulia Liovochkina's company Teleferic Holdings.
Liovochkina's company had a representative in Ukraine, Andrii Bantsner, who was an assistant to MP Kaskiv. And the director of Teleferic Holdings was Gernot Leitner, the same investor who came to the President's Office in 2020 for a meeting. By the way, his company, Masterconcept, has implemented more than one project in russia since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In particular, the Sochi Olympics in 2014 and the FIFA World Cup in 2018.
In addition, Gernot Leitner owns the Slovak company Carpathian Mountain Resort, s.r.o., which owns 12 companies in Ukraine. They are managed by Iryna Kukh, a former employee of the State Investment Project when it was headed by Kaskiv. At the end of 2021, these 12 companies owned 450 hectares of Zakarpattia land, where they planned to build the "Borzhava" ski resort. But this was not enough.
From threats to criminal cases
On 7 March 2022, when fierce battles with the Russian invaders were taking place near Kyiv and most of the country was suffering from shelling, the fight for valuable land began at the "Grand Hotel Pylypets" in Zakarpattia.
Vladyslav Kaskiv tried to negotiate with a local businessman, Ivan Borychko, to give him his hotel, "Berloga".
In 2014, Ivan bought the land, drew up all the documents for the property, and began to build a hotel and restaurant complex on it. Now Kaskiv insists that he plans to build a ski lift there, and that Ivan's hotel will interfere with his plans.
"The ultimatum was very simple: 'If you don't take it back, we will seize it, take it away, and figure out what to do with it, so you have to understand that. That was the specific ultimatum," the businessman said.
And they did figured it out. The process involved the architect Valerii Beznoskyi, who, according to the locals, came to work in their amalgamated territorial community at the end of 2022. He redesigned the village's master plan in such a way that a piece of the land on which Ivan Borychko's hotel is located turned out to be a piece of land owned by Kaskiv's LLCs, "Borzhava SKI" and "Sky Land". The designer himself then went abroad and never came back to Ukraine. And the aforementioned companies filed a lawsuit against the entrepreneur demanding that he be ordered to demolish "Berloga". Moreover, criminal proceedings were opened against Borychko for allegedly unauthorised seizure of a land plot that had belonged to the village council before Ivan registered his ownership. Borychko's land plot itself was arrested.
"The prosecutor's office is now filing a civil case to seize the land in favour of the village council. By the way, Vladyslav himself told me about this scheme, saying that if I don't do it, the village council will seize it and then either give it to him or sell it. So far, everything is happening as he told me," says Ivan Borychok.
But Ivan's story in Pylypets is far from unique.
Nadiia Hladio is a resident of the neighbouring village of Podobovets, which is part of the same ATC. By a strange coincidence, they also want to take away her house, which she and her family have spent the last 10 years of their lives building. The land for her family was allocated by the village council back in 2013. Later, they received all the documents and ownership.
"In 2013, we started building, in 2017 we almost had a house, and we privatised it, we had all the documents ready. This whole catastrophe has been going on for three years now. The calls are anonymous. They say: "I'll buy this house," in Russian. And I answered: "This house is not for sale, we are building it for ourselves," says Nadiia Hladio.
Nadiia decided to ignore the calls. And after a while, the cables that had just been connected to the house were cut. When even this did not work for the Hladio family, a criminal case appeared in the register of court decisions in September 2022. It was alleged that Nadiia's husband, together with the then village head, had illegally seized the land back in 2013, and that the plot was located outside any settlement.
Next to Nadiia' s plot, there is another one on the cadastral map, with a 25-hectare area. It belongs to "Borzhava-Zamkova Hora" LLC. The company's beneficiary is Rovshan Huseynov, Renata Huseynova's father. She was Kaskiv' s assistant in the parliament when he was an MP, and now she is his common-law wife, with whom the MP has a son. Although he is registered in Kyiv, Rovshan owns 97 other plots of land in Mizhhiria district, most of which are located in Pylypets. 40 more plots are owned by Renata. The company "Borzhava Centre", which she owns, has another 25.
To find out who is suing whom and for what, as well as what happened to the new master plan, which the locals have not seen, we went to see Vitalii Pyrynets, head of the Pylypets ATC. He assured us that there was a new general plan, but he could not show it to us because the architect was abroad, the lawyer was on sick leave, and he himself had no authority to show the general plan.
We agreed to meet with Vitalii Pyrynets the next day, saying that a lawyer would be there and we could study the new general plan of the village together. However, the head of the ATC suddenly left the village.
Arakhamia is not engaged in reputation management
Vladyslav Kaskiv did not answer the calls of hromadske journalists. Therefore, it was possible to ask him questions only during an unscheduled session of the Transcarpathian Regional Council. But he was not in the mood to answer.
"I am not interested in you or your questions. I don't consider you a media outlet, so I have neither the desire nor the intention to communicate with you," Vladyslav Kaskiv replied.
During the investigation, we also learned that in early October, the head of the "Servant of the People" faction, David Arakhamia, visited Pylypets accompanied by Kaskiv. When asked by journalists what he and Kaskiv were doing in Zakarpattia, Arakhamia said that he was attracting investment and looking at "Borzhava" ski resort project.
