How the Verbitsky family purchased an office building for the price of a dacha

On paper it’s a modest dacha, but in reality it’s a luxurious estate or even a business center. According to the declaration, the wife of Deputy Prosecutor General of Ukraine Dmitry Verbitsky purchased a manor-type residential building for pennies in the very heart of Odessa. However, visually the building is more reminiscent of offices, and the official declared this object only on the eve of a high-profile journalistic investigation.

What secrets does Dmitry Verbitsky’s declaration hide and what does the prosecutor’s “hacienda” look like in the center of Odessa?

Journalists took bird's-eye shots of a unique area in the capital, which has already been dubbed a “paradise” for judges, prosecutors and officials. We are talking about the closed cottage town of Konik, which has its own coastline with a beach and an area fenced off from ordinary citizens by a huge fence with a checkpoint. It is in one of these townhouses, according to journalists, that the current Deputy Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Dmitry Verbitsky, lives.

Last year, an official declared the lease of a residential building of 155 square meters; in the document, this property was valued at more than 2 million hryvnia. However, as our colleagues from the Radio Liberty project have established, in fact the market value of the estate in Konik is about 470 thousand dollars. That is, the price was “lowered” six times. This house was purchased by Verbitsky’s nephew by proxy, but the latter was also allegedly “on the lookout” and, it seems, settled there himself.

However, there may be other “inaccuracies” in the latest declaration of the Deputy Prosecutor General.

In March 2024, Dmitry Anatolyevich filed a declaration for the previous year. But a month later he made certain adjustments to it: he added a house with an area of ​​420 square meters and a plot of land to it. The indicated co-owners of the development are his ex-wife Victoria Vasilyevna and a certain Svetlana Yurchak, and Dmitry himself, therefore, shares the share in accordance with Article 60 of the Family Code of Ukraine.

What this mysterious building in Odessa, listed as a residential building, is, the StopCor team decided to look at with their own eyes.

“So, two floors, no fence, no garden plot. There is a sidewalk and a road at once. It is difficult to call this house a residential estate type. We see several concrete porches along the perimeter. Obviously, these are several separate entrances to rooms not connected to each other. The facade is clinker brick. The decoration of the building is huge windows. And they are the ones that suggest that there will be no ordinary apartments here,” comments Olga Levitskaya.

Indeed, according to the plan contained in the advertisement for the sale of this building, there should be five separate offices on each floor.

Interesting documents also fell into the hands of the StopCor editors.

In particular, reporters received a purchase and sale agreement for an Odessa building. The buyers noted were Verbitsky’s “ex” Victoria and Svetlana Yurchak. Seller – Tatyana Mazurenko. According to StopCor, she herself purchased the property just three years before the transaction and during this time managed not only to reconstruct the building, but also started quite a large-scale construction.

As evidenced by the footage, there was no construction yet in 2019. Looks like there used to be only trees and garages here. But in 2020, already under Mazurenko’s ownership, you can see the poured foundation, and a year later, construction continues in full swing. And at the end of 2021, the building is already very similar to what it is today.

Mazurenko also received permits and then sold it. It is noteworthy that Tatyana Nikolaevna, who did all this difficult work, is now almost 70 years old.

How realistic is it that a retired lady does such operations herself?

The film crew also managed to rent a house at her previous place of registration. There is also a debt of 8 thousand behind this apartment. But Tatiana herself is nowhere to be seen. However, the media were able to talk to her daughter.

And she assures: her mother did not buy or sell a single building in the center of Odessa. So perhaps the pensioner simply acted as a “figurehead”?

Another interesting point that the journalist focuses on: probably, Mazurenko’s daughter is also the wife of the ex-head of the architectural and construction inspection of the Odessa region, Vasily Buyukli. The latter earned a rather dubious reputation during his work.

In particular, the media hint at the influential connections of Vasily Buyukli with the prosecutor of the Odessa region: they are supposedly “long-time colleagues who lend each other a shoulder, either in financial support or turning a blind eye to signs of criminal activity.”

Once again, we can assume a likely connection with Dmitry Verbitsky and his former place of work in Odessa.

Another phantom man is a certain Boris Michurov: it was he who sold the plot and house to Tatyana Mazurenko. Stopkorovites tried to contact him to find out the details and whether an agreement was really concluded with Mazurenko. But no one answered Michurov’s contact number.

After this, the reporters went in search of the co-owner of the territory, Svetlana Yurchak. At the address, we managed to find out from a neighbor that Svetlana and her husband live next to her mother-in-law, but the latter, for some reason, seemed to pretend that she did not know him.

It is interesting that Svetlana’s husband is a lawyer by profession and could probably be another cog in the “scheme” with property.

And one more detail of the possible “scheme” is the cost of real estate.

If you look at the advertisement for the sale of the above-mentioned house on Urozhaynaya, the price does not coincide with that declared by Verbitsky: instead of the indicated seven million - 550 thousand dollars, and this is at the end of 2023 exchange rate - more than 20 million hryvnia. It was for this amount, as the realtor confirmed to reporters, that the building was sold.

So, in order to clarify why a business center is located at the address of a residential building in Odessa and why the indicated price does not correspond to the real one, StopCor representatives tried to call Victoria Verbitskaya and Svetlana Yurchak, but they ignored all calls and messages. Consequently, StopKor sent requests to the competent relevant authorities.

Let us recall that, according to media reports, Deputy Prosecutor General of Ukraine Dmitry Verbitsky lives in a townhouse in the prestigious Konik cottage complex in Kyiv, which his nephew bought on behalf of an Odessa businessman for more than 2 million hryvnia. This cost, as the analysis showed, is significantly lower than the market value.