Illegal schemes for the allocation of land plots, billions of dollars in contracts from the local budget, personnel appointments of numerous loyal officials and business with the local “Self-Help” are just some of the abuses during work in Zaporozhye, in which the Deputy Head of the Presidential Office Rostislav Shurma was involved.
Journalists of the Zaporozhye Investigation Center write about this, who collected 10 important facts known about the official from the time he worked at the Zaporizhstal plant. Journalists note that most of this data is publicly available.
Earlier, Bihus.info investigators published a story about state financing of Shurma’s brother’s solar power plants in the occupied territories.
Zaporozhye investigators recalled that back in 2016, Shurma and other top managers of Zaporizhstal secured all the key positions in the Zaporozhye mayor’s office, which is why the city council began to be called the “plant mayor’s office.”
“The majority of the City Council was formed from the Zaporizhstal Opposition Bloc, the Samopomich of the Marchenko brothers, the Motorists and the Kaltsevskys, and they voted for everything that was needed. In 2017, Shurma first had a little fight with the then head of the Regional State Administration Bryl for the regional council, and then on Bankova they were ordered to make peace, and then they had symbiosis and happiness,” the publication says.
Also in those years, contractors from Zaporizhstal received about 900 million hryvnia from the city budget.
As for land abuses, back in 2018-2019, according to journalists, “the city council transferred a bunch of land to companies ‘under Shurma’.”
“A company appeared out of nowhere, created a month ago, its founder was traditionally the Helios investment fund, the director of the fund was Pound Didenko, assistant to the head of the budget commission and financial director of Zaporizhstal Ruslan Bozhko. The City Council voted for another 15 or 30 hectares in the vicinity of Zaporozhye, and 240 hectares “accumulated” there in two years. When Shurma left the city, his brother Oleg, already mentioned in the investigation about the SES, was made the head of this Helios,” the message says.
“These hundreds of hectares were withdrawn from the land competition because the City Council manipulated the legislation, leasing them as elements of energy infrastructure (power lines, substations), and not the generation that they were. Later, a very low rental rate was established for SES within the city,” the authors of the publication add.
In their opinion, “Shurma “twisted” the classic scheme of Kyiv developers - when there is a piece of land for the use of a utility company and it is given to a private company for development.”
“KP is supposedly the customer who simply gives away the land, the developer acts as a contractor and then “pays” KP with several apartments in a new building. They do this to bypass the City Council session and the competition for rental rights,” the investigators wrote. According to them, Shurma and Bozhko were actively buying up deteriorating real estate and the plots under it.
“This is not very official and verified information, but you hear it quite often. That Shurma is an informal “senior partner” of the Marchenko brothers, who worked fruitfully with him from Samopomich in those years. The Marchenko brothers are Sensar. The infamous 6-story water closet in the Park of Labor Glory, the medical center next to Dubov Gai, the “Quarter” next to Voznesenovka and the like,” the message says.
According to the authors, in 2019, when Vladimir Zelensky launched early parliamentary elections, Rostislav Shurma promoted “a friendly team of strong business executives from Zaporizhstal / City Hall to the Verkhovna Rada,” but they gained very little percentage.
“And a few months after such a failure, Shurma announced that these were wonderful years in Zaporozhye, but it was time to move on - and he moved to end up on Bankova in a year and a half,” the publication says.
