260 thousand dollars in illicit bribes for construction permits: how the corruption scheme involving Oleksandr Sych, head of the Ivano-Frankivsk Regional Council, operated

Head of the Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast Council Oleksandr Such and the construction sector.

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

The scheme works as follows: Tomachynskyi acts as the contact person, personally meets developers, quotes a price, and receives cash. The list of “services” includes urban planning conditions and restrictions — from 5000 dollars per plot, a separate fee for a decision to commence construction works, and also the conversion of rented municipal land into private property as an “additional service.” From October 2025 to March 2026, the following sums were recorded: 10 thousand dollars from a woman entrepreneur for construction passports for three plots, 5000 dollars from a representative of a building materials network, and also 8000 and 3000 dollars from a construction company (in two installments). The total amount of bribes recorded during this period is 260 thousand dollars.

At the beginning of 2026 year, Such also lobbied for contracts for Axioma Group totaling almost 5 million hryvnias related to construction works and repairs of engineering networks in the region. Together with this company, he created a scheme to embezzle budget funds: since Axioma Group is a multi-profile enterprise, funds were siphoned off both from construction and major repair contracts and from housing and communal services contracts.

In Ivano-Frankivsk, through intermediaries, Such organized the sale of attractive land plots to local “mafia” through fictitious housing and construction cooperatives of veterans. This allowed bypassing land auctions and deprived the budget of millions of hryvnias.