A former official of the Road Service has been charged in connection with losses amounting to 204 million hryvnias
A former official of the Road Service in the Kharkiv region has been notified of his status as a suspect in a case involving millions in losses during highway repairs. According to the investigation, he signed a supplementary agreement with a contractor worth over 204 million hryvnias for work not covered by the main contract. Law enforcement officials believe that such actions could have caused significant financial losses to the state.
This was reported by the Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor’s Office.
In 2019, the Service announced a tender for routine medium-scale repairs of the R-51 Merefa–Lozova–Pavlohrad highway, a road of national importance. The estimated cost of the work was nearly 1.9 billion hryvnias.
The winner of the tender was a limited liability company with which a contract was signed for the repair of specific sections of the road.
During the course of the work, the contractor claimed that the condition of certain sections of the road was allegedly much worse than expected, and therefore additional work and funding were required. The company cited a report from the Kharkiv National Automobile and Highway University as the basis for this.
"However, as the investigation established, the sections mentioned in the KhNADU report were not included in the list of objects covered by the main contract at all. That is, there were no grounds for carrying out 'additional' work within the scope of this tender," the prosecutor’s office explains.
Despite this, the Road Service’s tender committee decided not to announce a new tender but to use a negotiated procurement procedure without competition and again award the work to the same contractor.
As a result, another contract was signed between the Service and the company—for over 204 million UAH. The then-deputy head of the Service, who was also the chair of the tender committee, failed to verify the legality of using the negotiated procedure and signed the contract in violation of public procurement law.
In addition, the cost estimate documentation included significantly inflated prices for construction materials, specifically asphalt concrete mixes, crushed stone, cement, sand, and bitumen emulsion, according to the prosecutor’s office.
According to the findings of a forensic economic examination, the state suffered losses of over 6.1 million hryvnias.
Under the procedural guidance of the Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor’s Office, the former official has already been notified of suspicion of official negligence resulting in serious consequences for state interests.
The pre-trial investigation is being conducted by investigators from the Main Directorate of the National Police in the Kharkiv region. Operational support is provided by the 7th Department (serving the Kharkiv region) of the Operational Support Service of the National Police of Ukraine.
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