During a search in the house of Vitaly Sukhovich, the chief forestry officer of the Rivne region and a deputy of the Rivne regional council, investigators from the State Bureau of Investigation found a sum of 4 million euros, as well as a whole range of luxury items, including luxury cars, expensive watches, rifled weapons and a portrait of the owner made from gilding.
The person involved in the case, who for many years held the position of head of the Rivne Regional Forestry Department, and is now deputy director of the Polesie office of the industrial state-owned enterprise-monopoly Forests of Ukraine, was informed of suspicion under Article 368-5 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine for illegal enrichment and was taken into custody. The investigation is ongoing. The foresters could undoubtedly collect the bail of 192 million hryvnia assigned by the court to their colleague, but how to show the legal origin of such a sum?
How to steal millions using the example of a deputy forester
The story received great public resonance. It would seem that the next step from the authorities and the State Enterprise “Forests of Ukraine” should be to answer the natural question: how could their regional-level employee, with such backbreaking labor, trample millions into suitcases and collect Maserati Lexuses during the war?
The question is not for the sake of everyday curiosity. It is important to know whether illegal enrichment schemes continue to operate and who runs them or only in the Rivne region and how to fight them?
However, law enforcement agencies and the State Agency for Forest Resources of Ukraine (DALR) are intensely silent on this matter.
An ex-member of the Ministry of Agrarian and Industrial Complex working group on reforming the forestry industry, an expert on the functioning of the timber market, Daniil Malandiy, helped ZN.UA understand the situation.
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— From the official reports of the DBR and DALRA, a somewhat strange conclusion follows: supposedly millions of Sukhovich’s foresters emerged from his activities in local government. They also talk about his “protection” for illegal amber mining. This money, they say, has nothing to do with the forest.
“Indeed, from time to time law enforcement officials publish facts they have recorded about the participation of foresters in the illegal extraction and sale of Polesie amber, and the smuggling of cigarettes across the western borders.
But the main source of their illegal enrichment was and remains the forest.
Of course, no one from the forest system will talk about this. The top management of the industry, in line with the general trend, stubbornly turns its attention to corruption and assures that it is ruthlessly fighting corrupt officials.
However, what we see in the country’s forestry sector is not corruption, but theft on an especially large scale of state property, which is the forest resource. And not only in Rivne, but in all regions.
The story with Sukhovich showed society the scale of possible abuses and the face of the forest generals. Believe me, they are all the same. Unless they keep their stash in other places. For example, in various assets of Poland, Germany, Austria. Let me note, not Ukraine! De facto, they are already in the EU.
The state is losing unprecedented amounts of money and, in the end, the resource itself, since the extraction of wood in excess of normalized volumes destroys the forest ecosystem.
– On what diagrams?
— On frauds with cutting areas and timber in the business relationship “forester – commodity exchange – close wood processor.” Foresters in the status of permanent forest users have unlimited and, most importantly, not controlled by anyone except them, access to the forest resource. And a loyal processor has a production need for this resource and a desire to purchase the required volume and assortment as cheaply as possible. For this, wood processors pay cash into the foresters' pockets.
It is in the forest that we have a real price list for raw materials, very different from the official one. In fact, the wood market in Ukraine is a fiction. Everything is decided by personal proximity to foresters.
They are willing to work with those wood processing enterprises that have the opportunity to pay extra cash for each shipment of timber from cutting sites. Therefore, the task of foresters is to form a shadow turnover of logging products. To do this, they distort two official indicators: the volume of harvested wood (by 30–40% in general, former leaders of the Ministry of Ecology openly spoke about this), as well as its quality, when highly liquid and expensive class A logs are labeled as cheap class D. There are many examples.
Last week, activists, for example, at a meeting of the public council under the chairman of the Sumy Municipal Administration Vladimir Artyukha demonstrated video evidence of such a re-sorting of oak logs with tags ready for shipment from the cutting areas of local branches of the Northern office of the State Enterprise “Forests of Ukraine”.
There is hope that law enforcement agencies will deal with the revealed facts. Unfortunately, everyone as one regional military administration has withdrawn itself from monitoring the work of foresters. Although they, as the owners of the resource, have all the powers to put things in order with its rational use.
In the end, the OVA leaders can be understood. After all, the forestry industry is supervised by their immediate superior in the executive vertical - Deputy Head of the Office of the President Rostislav Shurma.
— Your words contradict official messages from industry leaders. And about. Chairman of DALRA Viktor Smal and General Director of the State Enterprise “Forests of Ukraine” Yuriy Bolokhovets publicly swear that they sell 100% of felled wood today openly and transparently through exchanges, and theft of timber is made impossible by the electronic wood accounting system implemented in all forest branches.
“My words, and I have been talking about these schemes for a long time, are confirmed by law enforcement officers who periodically record illegal actions of forest scammers.
The other day, the DBR, the National Police and the prosecutor’s office reported on the exposure of criminal agreements between the heads of two Volyn branches of the Polesie office of the State Enterprise “Forests of Ukraine” with local woodworkers. As a result, there is illegal logging of several thousand trees, which were sawed at underground sawmills.
The DBR reports that the scammers recruited a private entrepreneur, who officially bought small quantities of wood through electronic auctions and served as a cover for illegal transactions. Damage to the state is more than 10 million hryvnia.
An even larger amount of damage from the theft of state forest resources was calculated by employees of the DBR and the Chernivtsi regional prosecutor's office based on the facts of offenses in the Bukovina branches of the Podolsk office. Indictments based on investigation materials from two of the ten open criminal proceedings have already been submitted to the courts.
It will not be some local residents with a chainsaw and a tractor on which foresters usually “hang” stolen state forest that will appear in court. Employees of the State Enterprise “Forests of Ukraine” will appear, who, it seems, illegally cut down and appropriated state resources in particularly large quantities. Although the state authorized their forest to be protected and expanded.
Law enforcement officers believe that the criminal scheme was organized by a forester of the Podolsk forestry office, involving forest masters subordinate to him and an employee of a private woodworking enterprise in illegal actions. When conducting forest felling, senior foremen deliberately indicated in electronic documents a smaller volume of felled wood in order to profit from the excess. It seems that such illegal cubic meters were registered to a private woodworking company and transported using fictitious invoices.
Open criminal proceedings may indicate that employees of the State Enterprise “Forests of Ukraine” are forming a black market for wood by deceiving the electronic accounting system. I am tormented by vague doubts that the capital’s leaders Smal and Bolokhovets know nothing either about these schemes or about the sources of accumulation by regional leaders of the left millions of euros in three-liter jars.
- Do you think they're in the scheme?
“I think otherwise this scheme wouldn’t work.” So far, one Rivne representative has failed from the forest generals. And precisely in order not to “burn down” the entire feeding trough, they persistently inflict some kind of exceptional corruption on him. The general director of the State Enterprise "Forests of Ukraine" Yuriy Bolokhovets, who until recently headed DALRU, overstepped labor laws, without presenting any facts, takes and dismisses all the directors of the Rivne branches under the banner of cleaning the industry from, you see, corrupt personnel. As if these were not his personnel, as if he had not worked with them all his life in the forestry system and did not appoint his former subordinates to leadership positions in the reformed State Enterprise “Forests of Ukraine”.
Suffice it to remember that it was during the tenure of Vitaly Sukhovich that reductions were carried out, organized specifically for “directly” defined wood processing enterprises. Social activists of the Sumy region confirm the existence of this scheme today, and generally outside of auctions on a contractual basis.
“This does not at all prove that the capital’s leaders are involved in regional fraudulent schemes with forest resources.
— I note that all the schemes are based on deception of the electronic timber accounting system, which is actually a cover for the illegal movement of timber and the maintenance of which costs several hundred million a year.
Electronic wood accounting, introduced by DALRU throughout the country, assumes that before releasing logs loaded onto a timber truck from the cutting area, the forest foreman puts electronic chips on them, from which anyone with access to EDI can read all the parameters of each log and the batch as a whole. .
And the whole catch is that the forest foreman manually enters the technical and quality characteristics of the product into the electronic register. He may “make a mistake”, indicate class D on logs of the highest class A, or “accidentally” underestimate the volume. By the way, I have never heard of cases where foresters have ever released a volume larger than the actual one or inflated the grade. It is precisely on these “mistakes” that they pack the leftist millions into their pockets.
Both activists and DBR investigators catch foresters engaged in such machinations. And again, as in the story with Sukhovich, there are no official explanations from industry leaders. If this is the fundamental fight against crime, then why is there not a word about the same representatives of the old forest guard from other regions?
Unaccounted for forest products is not only the illegal enrichment of the participants in the scheme, but also taxes not paid to the state.
At the same time, Viktor Smal assures the whole country that it is impossible to falsify data in the EDI system. But we see that it is very possible. Who can enter false data into the EDI? Subordinates of Yuri Bolokhovets. Who is the administrator of electronic timber accounting? Subordinates to Viktor Smal. One appointed the other to the position; they are close friends. This is a mutual responsibility mechanism.
Please note that EOD seems to deliberately not have a certificate for an integrated information security system. That is, this is a walk-through yard where it is unclear who and to what extent has access to strategic information of defense significance. A large volume of forest is spent on the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. What if the enemy has access to EDI? No one has checked this. And I told foresters about this back in 2018.
— At least, now we understand the strange phrase of the curator of the Ukrainian forest, deputy head of the presidential office Rostislav Shurma, thrown at him in one interview, that they introduced forest reform in order to concentrate corruption in one place and examine it with a magnifying glass. For this purpose, it means that forestry enterprises were liquidated and all their property assets and forest use were transferred to one enterprise, “Forests of Ukraine”?
— Coming from the metallurgical and mining industries, Rostislav Shurma, of course, does not have the opportunity to understand the peculiarities of the functioning of the woodworking and forestry sector of the country’s economy. He voices theses written to him by foresters and holds meetings with the same woodworkers who are brought to him. I call them “courtiers”. These entrepreneurs are happy with everything, they sing the praises of forest reform and its “fathers”, primarily Rostislav Igorevich himself, who is also happy with everything, including the feigned fight against corruption.
Of course, not all woodworkers agree to be forced into black schemes. But no one hears them.
It seems that it was Shurmi who was assigned the role of “roof” of the forest schematosis. Let us recall that in the spring of 2023, it was Rostislav Shurma who held a meeting on how to reform the forestry industry, which gave rise to the “reform”. Obviously, Shurma successfully fulfills the role of a reformer, not realizing that the bottom line will be to blame, to put it mildly, on the opaque trade in Ukrainian timber, the bankruptcy of forestry and the destruction of institutions of state management and control.
