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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
"Eternal mayors" and corruption feeding troughs?
Many years in office as mayor – a mechanism for personal enrichment and a guaranteed usurpation of local power and control over budgetary flows.
Lviv mayor Andriy Sadovyi is Ukraine's champion for the longest tenure as mayor of a major city.
If you look at the news on the websites of cities where mayors remain in office for several terms, you can see a characteristic feature – they don't report local government corruption schemes as something sensational. Journalists write about embezzlement in procurement as if describing an annual city-day celebration – everyone knows who, how, when, and where, so the surprising thing is not the corruption itself but only the sudden raids by law-enforcement agencies following the latest journalistic investigation.
It is precisely the long stay in power, which nullifies almost all safeguards, that makes this terrible situation possible, when whole cities fall under the dependence of a single person – the mayor, or the puppet masters behind him.
Formally, today the record-holder among long-serving Ukrainian mayors is the head of beleaguered Bakhmut in Donetsk region, Oleksiy Reva. He became the city's leader back in 1990, during the USSR. As a person of the "old school," he was accused of corruption only once during that time. Since then he has worked "cleanly."
Turning to large cities, where there is more money and therefore more corruption, it is notable that almost all the "long-timers" came to power in the local elections of 2010 and have not let go since (only the death of Hennadiy Kernes prevented him from remaining mayor of Kharkiv). Among other long-serving mayors who came in 2010 are Yuriy Vilkul in Kryvyi Rih, Mykhailo Symashkevych in Kamianets-Podilskyi, Ihor Sapozhko in Brovary, Serhiy Nadal in Ternopil, and Volodymyr Khomko in Rivne.
Leading them by one electoral cycle is the current heavyweight champion – Lviv mayor Andriy Sadovyi, who has been in power since 2006. He was elected during what Lviv newspapers then described as the dirtiest local elections.
Long-term mayoralty — long-term corruption
Using the vivid example of Andriy Sadovyi, we will analyze why a long stay in office does not benefit cities and why the practice of cultivating local "Putins" and "Lukashenkos," which can lead to passing power to heirs, must be stopped.
The first thing Mayor Sadovyi thinks about is staying in power. So he tried to maintain good relations with all presidents. Even with Viktor Yanukovych, who was later convicted of treason. In 2011 Sadovyi was caught on camera at Yanukovych's birthday alongside Kharkiv mayor Kernes. After the video was released following the Revolution of Dignity, Sadovyi defended himself, saying he needed money for Euro-2012. A strange place to be begging for money, isn't it? In this context it's also worth recalling another trait of Lviv's mayor – boundless opportunism. At one point he even professed love for... the Russian language.
Everything changed when Sadovyi's party, Samopomich, entered parliament and formed the third-largest faction there. Sadovyi, who did not hide his presidential ambitions, failed to reach an agreement with then-Bankova occupant Petro Poroshenko and received from Poroshenko's techs a "garbage blockade" of the city, thanks to which Sadovyi lost in the ratings but managed to sink Poroshenko's ratings in Lviv even more.
Under Volodymyr Zelenskyy's rule, Sadovyi initially fared well – he tried to stay away from Servant of the People and did not attack the new president. But a moment always comes when quantity turns into quality. The corruption baggage accumulated over the years simply began to burst through.
In November 2019 the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office announced suspicions against Sadovyi of abuse of power. The gist of the criminal case was as follows – the sale of land on the border of Lviv and the village of Riasne-Ruska to the Dutch company CTP for construction of an industrial park in 2015 for 54 million hryvnias. Sadovyi and his "young team" sold land that belonged to the village community and at a price reduced several times.
Then the snowball began to grow. People started to recall everything from many years past when he covered up his managerial "mistakes" and corruption schemes through his own media (including the 24 TV channel), always finding a convenient scapegoat.
Sadovyi's first major corruption scandal as mayor (not counting deceived 200 thousand investors of "Halytski Investytsii") was about 10 criminal cases opened in 2014–2015 concerning fraud and corruption in preparations for Euro-2012 in Lviv. Only in designing the construction of the "Arena Lviv" some 24 million hryvnias were stolen from the budget (a considerable sum at the time). 37 million hryvnias were transferred to the account of the Austrian firm ALPINBAU GmbH for the development of design and estimate documentation for the stadium, and then expertise showed that the value of that service was no more than 13 million hryvnias.
Sadovyi launched his own "Great Construction" long before Zelenskyy. On roads before Euro-2012 alone, Sadovyi funneled through Lvivavtodor and the now-famous Onur at least 36 million hryvnias (that's what the State Financial Inspection in Lviv region calculated). Those funds were provided by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
On the purchase of trams for Euro-2012 Sadovyi's team "earned" about 15 million hryvnias by failing to buy three trams from a batch of 14 units.
The "garbage blockade" of Lviv, as Sadovyi presented it to citizens, was the result of inaction by his executive committee, as a result of which four people died at the closed municipal landfill. A court found Lviv mayor Andriy Sadovyi and the executive committee guilty of inaction in closing the landfill. On 30 May 2016 a criminal case was opened by Lviv region police into a fire at the Lviv waste landfill. However, smaller officials were made the culprits. The biggest "fish" was the former head of the Lviv City Council Housing Department, Yuriy Holiets. He remained in office until November 2016, until he was caught taking a bribe.
And these are only the largest cases that became known to the public and subject to criminal investigation. Smaller schemes are still operating, causing losses to Lviv's budget and preventing the city from developing.
What is the solution? Changes to legislation and limits on time in office are needed
The example of Sadovyi shows that long-term mayoralty is used exclusively as a mechanism for the personal enrichment of the mayor and his circle. By nature, this is feudal usurpation of power, supported by corruption, voting networks within the administrative apparatus, and owned media that openly tell Lviv residents that they are thugs!
Existing legislation and the current law-enforcement system cannot stop feudalization. Therefore, to eradicate it in Lviv and other Ukrainian cities, new safeguards are needed. One such safeguard could be to limit a mayor's time in office to no more than two consecutive terms (as with the presidency). In the United States, for example, this is an established practice in local government. In New York, for instance, not only the mayor but other officials in his administration are limited to two terms.
Ukraine's feudalization must be stopped before we lose the country!
Author: Olena Mokhniuk
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "«Вічні мери» та корупційні годівниці?". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: ANTIKOR.
