The wife and mother-in-law of businessman Igor Grinkevich, suspected of large-scale corruption in the army budget, hid several apartments and an estate of 600 m² from the investigation. As of the end of January, none of the family objects found by the “hromeske” investigators had been arrested by the State Bureau of Investigation. Despite the fact that the DBI announced the seizure of certain property of the Grinkevichs on January 11.
Svetlana Grinkevich and her mother Irina Fedak acquired five apartments in Kyiv and Lviv, three plots of land and a luxurious estate after a full-scale invasion. That is, during the period when Igor Grinkevich’s companies received multimillion-dollar contracts from the Ministry of Defense. Only one plot of land was purchased before the great war. Let us remind you that on December 29, the DBI arrested Lviv businessman Igor Grinkevich. He paid investigators half a million dollars in bribes to clear the seizure of clothing his companies were supposed to supply to the Department of Defense. Investigators found that Grinkevich’s companies won 23 tenders to supply the Ministry of Defense with clothing worth more than 1.5 billion hryvnia. A number of contracts were not fulfilled, some were implemented partially, with delays, and in general caused damage to the state of almost one billion hryvnia.
Already on January 11, the DBI announced the seizure of the property of the Grinkevich family: real estate, premium cars, property and accounts of companies controlled by them. But between December 29, when Igor Grinkevich was arrested, and January 11, when the DBI finally mentioned the seizure of property, almost two weeks passed. And all the most interesting things happened during this period.
Suspicious "mortgages"
On January 25, we checked the property of Roman and Igor Grinkevich in the registers and were amazed: exactly one plot each was registered for father and son for farming in the Kiev region, there were no other assets. Therefore, we began to check the property of members of the Grinkevich family.
Most of the property turned out to be registered in the name of the businessman’s wife, Svetlana. We focused on the one we acquired during the full-scale invasion.
These are two luxury apartments on Novopecherskie Lipki of the capital: 50 and 123 m² next door, which were purchased on May 17, 2023. Right in the midst of deals between Igor Grinkevich’s companies on Defense Ministry contracts. Apartments of similar size in these new buildings will cost at least 20 million hryvnia.
A day after her husband’s arrest, right before the New Year, on December 31, Svetlana Grinkevich took out a 5 million hryvnia loan from a certain Alexander Lapshin. And on January 2, I came to the notary and imposed a so-called encumbrance on both apartments because of this loan. In the register it is now listed as a mortgage agreement.
Before the New Year, on December 31, Svetlana Grinkevich took out a 5 million UAH loan from Alexander Lapshin. Information from the State Register of Rights
Lawyer Yaroslav Butirin explained to us why this was done:
“This is a standard scheme for holding property. If people are afraid that something might be taken away from them, they go to a notary and say: “We have a receipt for a million, we want to sign a mortgage agreement against this receipt.” There is a Law of Ukraine on mortgages, and it states that the mortgagee is the priority creditor. That is, the property is secured by a mortgage and cannot be seized.”
That is, the borrower is the priority owner of the property, and the properties themselves become inaccessible to arrests and confiscations. The scheme was repeated at another property of Svetlana Grinkevich - Kyiv apartments in a club house on Nivki. The apartment's area is modest - only 30 m², but the cheapest and smaller one was recently sold for 1.5 million hryvnia. That is, this apartment of Svetlana can be valued at approximately 2 million hryvnia.
Here the situation with “mortgage” is more complicated. The property was purchased on December 8, 2023, three weeks before Igor Grinkevich’s arrest. It was formally bought by the businessman’s mother-in-law and Svetlana’s mother, Irina Fedak. On December 15, the women drew up a mortgage agreement with a notary: it seems that back in November, the daughter lent her mother 135 thousand dollars, almost 5 million hryvnia. But strangers to each other remembered about the debt more than a month later and only after they bought another apartment. What could be the explanation?
On December 15, the women signed a mortgage agreement with a notary. Information from the State Register of Rights
“Loan and mortgage agreements are concluded on the same day under normal conditions. This is done in one place and at one time, because a signature on a promissory note is a person’s good will. When a receipt or loan is issued today, and a mortgage is issued in three days or a month, it looks stupid, but is quite legal. In this case, it is impossible to find out when the receipt was actually written there,” says lawyer Yaroslav Butirin.
That is, whether that debt was there or not, no one can determine. As to confirm our hypothesis, on the same day, December 15, 2023, mother and daughter signed another mortgage agreement - this time for an apartment in Lviv. These luxurious apartments in a fashionable residential complex with an area of 130 m² cost the family at least 7 million UAH. Svetlana’s mother purchased the apartment in November 2023. And in December, she also gave her bail to her daughter.
Why do these mortgage agreements between Svetlana Grinkevich and her mother look dubious?
Firstly, Irina Fedak owns shares or entire companies of the Grinkevich family group. According to the YouControl service, this group includes 25 companies that are engaged in many businesses: from quarries and construction to advertising and trade in textile goods, which were precisely supplied to the Ukrainian army. There are no extra people among the owners of numerous companies: everything is registered exclusively in the name of family members - son, daughter, wife and mother-in-law. That is, Mr. Grinkevich registered business assets in his mother-in-law’s name a long time ago; she is an important part of their empire.
Secondly, Svetlana Grinkevich and her mother carried out all these operations with mortgages and loans precisely then, in November-December 2023, when the clothes of Igor Grinkevich’s companies for the Ministry of Defense were already seized. Now the fictitiousness of these agreements and the origin of the money must be proven in court.
“If the investigator deems it necessary and has grounds, the court will place another arrest on this property. And even if the mortgage is lifted, the arrest of the court will not go away,” Butirin is sure.
Thirdly, remember two luxury apartments on Novopecherskie Lipka, bought by Svetlana in May 2023. In the summer of 2022, her mother, Irina Fedak, also bought an apartment in a neighboring building. Its 85 m² cost at least 6 million hryvnia. July 2022 is exactly the same time when her son-in-law’s companies began to receive the first serious money from the Ministry of Defense.
As a final argument, our main find is a diamond in the Grinkevich family’s real estate collection, which does not exist in the registers.
Schrödinger Palace
Svetlana Grinkevich owns a modest plot of land in the Podsnezhnik gardening community on the outskirts of Lviv. This is a cozy corner of the city right on the border with the Vinnikovsky Forest Park.
A modest plot of land with a house was registered in Svetlana’s name on August 1, 2022. But there are not 6 acres here at all, but much more. This “more” - three plots with a total area of 20 acres - is registered in the name of her mother, Irina Fedak. Two plots were registered in March 2022, and Fedak bought the main one, 10 acres, back in April 2019. At the same time, she declared a house of 300 square meters on this plot.
In the advertisement for the sale of the same plot in 2018, we see a similar gray fence and recognize the neighboring houses. The plot cost 110 thousand dollars, it’s worth reading the text: “According to the documents, it’s 20 hundredths, but it’s 25. There is an unfinished house on the plot.”
We assume that Irina Fedak de facto acquired all 25 acres at once, and their de jure registration took 4 years.
On January 31, 2024, hromadske received an Act on the inspection of the territory from the commission of the Lviv City Council. It was held at the request of our editors. It turned out that in addition to the registered plots of 25 acres, another 26 acres of forest were simply seized by the Grinkevich family.
“Approximately 21 acres are all seized state lands of the Lviv Forestry State Enterprise. That is, this is a forest and lands of a natural reserve fund, where you can’t do anything except pick mushrooms. But it’s definitely not cutting down trees to build a fence or pave a road. However, this is exactly what the Grinkevich family did,” said Lviv’s deputy mayor for urban planning, Lyubomir Zubach.
Officials also noted that the pool was built on a plot intended for gardening, and a road illegally cut down in the forest leads to the house.
The main confusion is with houses. In 2019, my mother added a 300 m² house to the registry, and her daughter, in 2022, added a 60 m² hut. Despite the different postal addresses, the cadastral numbers of all four plots are nearby and are now surrounded by a single fence. The property on site is much more than 300 or even more so - 60 m². We have reviewed the technical documents for the house and confirm that its area is 600 m².
Considering that neither the mother-in-law’s house nor the house of Igor Grinkevich’s wife now exists, we conclude that they dismantled both houses and built a luxurious estate from scratch with a sauna, cinema, gym, spa area, reading room, 3 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms and other premises.
Neighbors claim that active construction continued until the new year, until the arrest of Igor Grinkevich. Currently, there are no guards or other traces of life activity on the territory.
It is very difficult to value such an asset. The plot, we recall, cost 110 thousand dollars or 5 million hryvnia. Houses of similar size in neighboring areas of Lviv cost 25-28 million hryvnia. Even with a discount on unfinished construction and landscaping of the area around, the estate can safely be valued at at least 20 million hryvnia.
This is how the counter for the value of property of only two members of the Grinkevich family reached 60 million hryvnia. 55 of them are what were bought exactly 2 years after the start of the full-scale invasion.
What did the DBI arrest?
On January 11, ARMA stated that, at the request of the DBI, it had found the property of the Grinkevich family. They remembered Svetlana’s Kyiv and Lviv apartments, companies, cars, but... not a word about Igor Grinkevich’s mother-in-law, Irina Fedak, and the 600 m² estate. Despite the fact that it is not in the registers, the DBI investigators did not think of conducting an inspection of Svetlana Grinkevich’s site.
Moreover, at the same time, on January 11, the DBR announced that all the property found had been seized, and remembered the wife’s apartments, which we talked about. But the investigator never reached the registrar in 20 days. For it is one thing to announce the seizure of property in the press, and another to include the relevant documents where necessary.
We emphasize: as of January 29, 2024, there is no information in the registers about the arrest of all of the above property of Svetlana Grinkevich and her mother Irina Fedak.
If the DBR proves that the Grinkevich companies “heated up” the Ministry of Defense for at least a billion hryvnia, then the state can compensate at least 60 million of this billion only from the property found by journalists. But first, the estate in Lviv, like Svetlana Grinkevich’s apartments, needs to be seized, and not just announced in the media.
