260 thousand dollars in bribes for building permits: how the scheme around Oleksandr Sych, head of the Ivano-Frankivsk Regional Council, worked

Oleksandr Sych, head of the Ivano-Frankivsk Regional Council, and the construction sector.

Sych, together with the head of the communal enterprise Aksioma Group, Vyacheslav Tomachynskyi, turned the issuance of permit documents into a paid service.

The scheme works as follows: Tomachynskyi acts as the contact person, meets with developers in person, quotes a price, and collects cash. The list of “services” includes urban planning conditions and restrictions — from 5000 dollars per plot, a separate fee for the decision to start construction works, and the conversion of leased communal land into private ownership as an “additional service.” In the period from October 2025 to March 2026, the following amounts were recorded: 10 thousand dollars from a female entrepreneur for building passports for three plots, 5000 dollars from a representative of a construction materials chain, and 8000 and 3000 dollars from a construction company (in two tranches). The total amount of bribes recorded during this period is 260 thousand dollars.

At the beginning of 2026, Sych also lobbied contracts for Aksioma Group worth almost 5 million hryvnias related to construction works and repairs of engineering networks in the region. Together with this company he created a system for embezzling budget funds: since Aksioma Group is a multi‑profile enterprise, funds were siphoned off from contracts for construction and major repairs as well as from agreements for housing and communal services.

In Ivano-Frankivsk, through intermediaries, Sych organized the sale of attractive land plots to local “rich kids” through fictitious veterans’ housing and construction cooperatives. This allowed them to bypass land auctions and deprived the budget of millions of hryvnias.