Sadovaya and Lviv or “Eternal Mayors” and corruption feeders?

Long-term mayorship is a mechanism for personal enrichment and guaranteed usurpation of local authorities and control of the flow of budget funds.

The mayor of Lvov, Andrey Sadovoy, is Ukraine’s champion for the longest tenure as mayor of a big city.

If you look at the news on the websites of cities where mayors do not change for several terms, you will see a characteristic feature - corruption deals of local authorities are not written about as something sensational. Journalists write about the theft of funds during procurement as if they were describing the annual celebration of the city day - everyone knows who, how, when, where, and therefore it is not the fact of corruption itself that can surprise, but only the sudden raids of law enforcement agencies based on information from the next journalistic investigation.

It is the many years of being in power, which neutralizes almost all safety precautions, that makes this terrible situation possible, when entire cities become dependent on one person - the mayor, or the puppet masters behind him.

Formally, today the record holder among Ukrainian long-living mayors is the head of the long-suffering Bakhmut in the Donetsk region, Alexey Reva. He became the head of the city back in 1990, during the Soviet era. As a man of the “old school”, during this time he only once received accusations of corruption. Since then it has worked cleanly.

Let's turn to big cities, where there is more money and more corruption. It is characteristic that almost all of the “long-livers” came to power in local elections in 2010, and have not let go of it since then (only the death of Gennady Kernes prevented him from remaining as mayor of Kharkov). Other long-term mayors who came in 2010 include: Yuriy Vilkul in Krivoy Rog, Mykhailo Simashkevich in Kamenets-Podilskyi, Igor Sapozhko in Brovary, Sergei Nadal in Ternopil and Vladimir Khomko in Rivne.

The current heavyweight champion, Lvov mayor Andrei Sadovy, who has been in power since 2006, is ahead of them all by one election cycle. He was elected during the dirtiest, as Lviv newspapers wrote then, local elections.

Long-term mayorship – long-term corruption

Using the vivid example of Andrei Sadovoy, we will analyze why long-term tenure does not bring benefits to cities, and why it is necessary to stop the practice of cultivating local “Putins” and “Lukashenkas”, which can result in the transfer of power to the heirs.

The first thing Mayor Sadovy thinks about is remaining in power. Therefore, he tried to maintain good relations with all the presidents. Even with Viktor Yanukovych, who was convicted of state treason. In 2011, Sadovoy was caught on camera at Yanukovych’s birthday party together with the mayor of Kharkov, Kernes. After the video was made public after the Revolution of Dignity, Sadovy made excuses that he needed money for Euro 2012. Strange place to get money, isn't it? Against this background, it is worth mentioning another feature of the Lviv mayor - limitless adaptability. At one time, he even confessed his love for... the Russian language.

Everything changed when Sadovyi’s Samopomich party entered parliament and created the third largest faction there. Sadovy, who did not hide his presidential ambitions, was unable to come to an agreement with the then owner of Bankova, Petro Poroshenko, and received from the latter’s technologists a “garbage blockade” of the city, thanks to which Sadovy lost his ranking, but was able to squander Poroshenko’s rating in Lviv even more.

At first, Sadovoy had a good time with the power of Vladimir Zelensky - he tried to stay away from the “Servants of the People” and did not make attacks towards the new president. But there always comes a moment when quantity develops into quality. The corruption baggage accumulated over the years began to simply break through.

In November 2019, the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office announced suspicion of abuse of power against Sadovoy. The plot of the criminal proceedings was as follows - the sale of land on the border of Lviv and the village of Ryasnoe-Russkoye to the Dutch company CTP for the construction of an industrial park in 2015 for 54 million UAH. Sadovyi and his “young team” sold land that belonged to the rural community, and at a several-fold reduced price.

Then the snowball began to grow. They began to remember Sadovoy for many years, when he talked about his managerial “failures” and corruption schemes through his own media (including TV channel 24), always finding a bad “extreme”.

Sadovoy’s first high-profile corruption scandal in the position of mayor (if you don’t remember the defrauded 200 thousand investors of Galician Investments) was about 10 criminal cases initiated in 2014-2015 on facts of fraud and corruption in preparation for Euro 2012 in Lviv. Only during the design of the construction of the Lviv Arena, 24 million UAH were stolen from the budget (at that time, decent funds). UAH 37 million was transferred to the account of the Austrian company ALPINBAU GmbH for the development of design estimates for the construction of the stadium, and then the examination showed that the cost of this service was no more than UAH 13 million.

Sadovy began his “Great Construction” long before Zelensky. Only on the roads before Euro 2012, Sadovy “scrolled” through Lvivavtodor and the now famous “Onur” at least 36 million UAH (this is how much the State Financial Inspectorate in the Lviv region counted). This money was provided by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

On the purchase of trams for Euro 2012, Sadovoy’s team earned about 15 million UAH, having not purchased three trams from a batch of 14 pieces.

The “garbage blockade” of Lvov, as Sadovy presented it to the townspeople, was a consequence of the inaction of its executive committee, which resulted in the deaths of four people at the closed city landfill. The court found the mayor of Lviv, Andrei Sadovoy, and the executive committee guilty of inaction in closing the landfill. On May 30, 2016, the Lviv region police opened criminal proceedings into a fire at the Lviv landfill. However, smaller officials were made the culprits. The biggest “fish” is the ex-head of the Housing Department of the Lviv City Council, Yuriy Golets. He remained in office until November 2016, when he was caught accepting a bribe.

And these are only the largest cases that became known to the public and became the subject of a criminal investigation. And there are even smaller schemes that cause damage to Lviv’s budget, preventing the city from developing.

Which exit? Changes to legislation and term limits in power are required

The example of Sadovoy shows that a long-term mayorship is used exclusively as a mechanism for the personal enrichment of the mayor himself and his entourage. At its core, this is a feudal usurpation of power, supported by the corruption component, voting networks of the administrative apparatus and its own media, which tell Lviv residents in their faces that they are titushki!

Existing legislation and the current law enforcement system cannot stop feudalization. Therefore, in order to eradicate it in Lviv and other cities of Ukraine, new fuses are needed. Such a safeguard could be the limitation of the mayor's being in power for no more than two consecutive terms (as with the presidential position). In the USA, for example, this is an established practice in local government. In New York, for example, not only the mayor, but also other officials from his administration are limited to two terms.

The feudalization of Ukraine must be stopped so as not to lose the country!