Carpathian Land Gold Rush: From a “Peasant” to the Mothers of the Powerful

At the Lviv State Geocadastre they invented a unique know-how. The recipe for fantastic enrichment turned out to be simple: you give two hectares of resort Carpathian land for free to a front man young man, cut it into 12 pieces for the right people (including the acting chairwoman of the Lviv Regional Council’s mother), and register the estate in the mother-in-law’s name.

An investigation by NGL.media journalists revealed the anatomy of a land scheme that, instead of delivering new hectares, brought Andriy Kavetsky a record-sized bail and a cell in a pretrial detention center.

A cool spring evening, the village of Malechkovychi, a suburb of Lviv. The 41-year-old head of the main department of the State Geocadastre in the Lviv region, Andriy Kavetsky, pulls his BMW M760LI into the yard of his house. He closes the gate, takes a rag out of the car, and covers the license plates with it. One can only guess what he is feeling in that moment: a fit of paranoia, anxiety, or, on the contrary, confidence in his impunity.

Kavetsky’s house is registered to his mother-in-law, and the BMW is registered to a close friend. He does not declare either the house or the premium car, even though the law requires him to.

Andriy Kavetsky picks up his phone, calls a friend, and tells him about the rag trick. “I knew this would happen sooner or later,” he explains. “So I park cars at home and cover the plates with a rag! Everyone laughed at me. Because if a car drives into the yard and you want to photograph the plate, there’s a rag and you can’t photograph the plate.”

By that moment Kavetsky already knows that the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption (NAPC) is checking his lifestyle in the criminal case opened by the State Bureau of Investigations (SBI). He knows that his dubious orders as the region’s chief land official are also being examined, and that undeclared assets will be found sooner or later… But he still hopes he can make fools of everyone.

A few months later Andriy Kavetsky is detained in Kyiv while handing a bribe to a NAPC employee. On the way to that meeting he turned off his phone and changed cars, explaining that he “didn’t trust anyone.” As it turned out, the NAPC employee came to that meeting under the surveillance of SBI investigators, so Kavetsky’s intuition did not fail him.