Ivan Fedorov’s road workers refuse to provide estimates of underground schools for 610 million

The state enterprise “Local Roads of the Zaporozhye Region” of the Zaporozhye Regional State Administration has been delaying access to estimates for the construction of underground schools in the amount of UAH 610 million for the second month. The Zaporozhye Investigation Center reported its correspondence with this state-owned enterprise.

In June, the construction of underground schools began in the Zaporozhye region. Their total contractual value is UAH 610 million. But Prozorro has not published estimates. Therefore, no one can find out at what prices concrete and reinforcement for the foundation, acrylic and putty for the next stage, and other materials for construction are purchased. Moreover, a considerable share of these hundreds of millions is money from foreign donors. Therefore, they need special control.

By estimate here we mean a final statement of resources, which indicates the prices of materials purchased for construction. In electronic form, it can be in .pdf format (or Word/Excel formats) or as part of a complete estimate in .imd format.

At the end of June, ZCR sent a request to Local Roads with a request to provide estimates for these objects. In July they responded that loading estimates into tender documentation is not established by current legislation. Because according to the law “On Public Procurement”, the customer of the work may indeed not require an estimate for the tender documentation from the contractor. The Zaporozhye road workers did not require any documents from the contractors that would confirm that the contract price was not set “out of the blue.”

At the same time, “ZCR” emphasized: in its response, “Local Roads” noted that public organizations are not included in the list of bodies authorized to exercise control in the field of procurement. That is, they questioned the need to provide “ZCR” with documents at all.

The Center provided references to laws and reasoning that price confirmation should still be part of the documentation in the second request. In July they were again told that, be that as it may, “Prozorro” did not have an estimate. They say that the final document with prices will be agreed upon at the stage of concluding the contract.

ZCR submitted the third request differently. This time they asked to provide estimate documents, which were agreed upon directly at the conclusion of the contracts. But Local Roads responded that due to long blackouts, they were working with great difficulties. There is no time to prepare a response, so it is postponed for 30 working days.

Simultaneously with sending the third request, ZCR turned for help to people's deputy Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, who heads the parliamentary committee on freedom of speech. In a response to the people's deputy, the state-owned enterprise also spoke about difficulties in work due to the blackout. But they said that they were ready to provide all the necessary documents for scanning if someone came and did it themselves. The Center agreed. On August 1, another letter was received from Yurchishin’s reception at “Local Roads” stating that on August 7 Ekaterina Zvereva would come to them for scanning.

However, when the ZCR employee arrived at the office, she was told that the day before, on August 6, they had just sent a message to the people’s deputy’s reception about another extension. They say that due to the significant volume of documents, they do not have time to prepare them for making copies. Therefore, they are asking to extend the response time. And for some reason they didn’t say whether the electronic file with the estimate even existed. Now Local Roads has taken until the beginning of September to prepare the documents. By this time, a significant part of the work will have already been completed at prices unknown to the public. Therefore, ZCR is preparing requests for the first acts of completed work.