The cosmic fortune of the family, millions in compensation from the budget and a loud scandal with the mayor of Uman: what made Cherkassy people’s deputy-ex-regional Yatsenko “famous” and how the case opened against him by the SBI ended
A fighter for the interests of society or a “waiter” with a trail of corruption? During the war, Cherkassy people's deputy Anton Yatsenko became famous for his high-profile legislative initiatives and media activity, but he is fighting not so much with the aggressor as with former comrades. In the meantime, the people's choice, officially almost homeless, receives material compensation from the state for housing and travel, his own relatives continue to get rich.
What condition could ex-regional Anton Yatsenko be hiding? How and why did the parliamentarian “beat the pot” with the mayor of Uman Irina Pletneva and the head of the regional administration of the Cherkasy region Igor Taburts? And finally, what does this have to do with the resonant case of “Kyiv in Three Days,” which was opened and then closed by the State Bureau of Investigation?
Mr. Yatsenko, who during his political career managed to change several parties (from the Party of Regions to Batkivshchyna), attracted the attention of journalists with his, at first glance, not very logical vote for the opening of e-declarations. The deputy pressed the “no” button. Although a year ago he seemed to publicly declare the need for transparency in declarations and proposed cutting the salaries of parliamentarians to the minimum. Does Yatsenko himself really have something to hide?
After all, de jure the ex-regional has neither a stake nor a yard. What about de facto?
“If you find declarations from 2008-2009 on the Internet, as soon as Mr. Yatsenko received a deputy mandate, then in fact his fortune simply soared,” comments lawyer Yana Krokhmaleva.
Indeed, as our colleagues from the “Our Money” project found several years ago, the people’s deputy lives in a luxurious estate in Kozin in the Kyiv region. However, according to documents, the housing does not belong to the politician himself, but to his father-in-law. In 2010, Yatsenko “gifted” this valuable object to a relative.
Then this investigation caused a great stir, and NABU became interested in Yatsenko. Detectives came to the conclusion that the deputy’s financial status does not correspond to his official earnings. But the case was still closed.
“Due to the peculiarities of the criminal law, which does not have retroactive effect in time, due to the fact that some norms of the Criminal Code were declared unconstitutional, and also taking into account the fact that the law on the possibility of recognizing unjustified assets and collecting them for state income came into force in 2019, in fact, now with all the property that was acquired by that time (until 2019, we cannot do anything. This was directly noted by the detective in the resolution on closure of criminal proceedings,” explains Yana Krokhmaleva.
Since then, the Yatsenko family fortune has only increased. Although, according to the register, the people's deputy himself is actually homeless.
So, in 2019, as follows from the declaration, the people’s deputy’s wife received UAH 58 million as a gift from her father, Ivan Kravchuk. According to the lawyer, this may indicate an attempt by the family to legalize funds.
In addition to that very estate of one and a half thousand square meters, located on a hectare of elite land in Kozin, Mr. Kravchuk has at least three dozen more real estate properties. He prepared the most recent of them even after the publication of the sensational investigation “Our Money”.
Thus, in 2020, Yatsenko’s father-in-law purchased eight commercial premises with a total area of almost one and a half thousand square meters in only one luxury residential complex “Delmar” on Dragomirova Street in Kyiv.
“On real estate websites, neighboring premises without renovation now cost from 2.5 to 4 thousand conventional units per square. Therefore, a very similar piece of Ivan Petrovich easily costs 4.5-5 million US dollars,” comments journalist Igor Khmury.
Several hundred more square meters of non-residential stock in the same residential complex were purchased by the people’s deputy’s sister, Daria. She, according to the registry, is the owner of about two dozen properties today. Well, with the people’s deputy’s wife, everything is a little more modest - two objects on Sichovykh Strelki Street, 50. Here, together with their father, they divided almost the entire elite area into two - more than six thousand square meters.
It can be assumed that all this countless real estate in the capital's new business-class buildings is for rent.
How does Anton Yatsenko himself comment on this information?
In order not to be unfounded, representatives of the editorial office decided to clarify the data on property and other interesting issues from the people’s deputy himself. By the way, the journalists managed to find Mr. Anton the first time - on the way out of the same father-in-law’s estate in Kozin.
The people's deputy came out to our correspondents, but said that he was in a hurry. He only managed to assure that his father-in-law’s estate had been declared and told his vision of the conflict with the leadership of Uman. They say that the dead man is a corrupt official and slandered him regarding the position of the “waiter” at the beginning of the war.
What kind of scandal are we talking about that affected several representatives of the Cherkasy region’s politics?
Against the backdrop of a full-scale war in Ukraine, the people’s deputy, elected to parliament from the Cherkasy region, is actually conducting his own “combat actions” - in the media and legal plane, against his own “compatriots”. Particularly harsh is the head of Uman, Irina Pletneva, who publicly abandoned Yatsenko’s pro-Russian position at the beginning of the invasion.
“The first thing was: “Are you stupid, what are you doing?” I didn’t understand at all what the question was about, what’s wrong? “You understand that Kyiv will fall in three days, but we will have to come to an agreement, life goes on.” And now we have the first conflict based on this,” said the head of the Uman City Council.
This is exactly how Pletneva recalls a telephone conversation with Anton Yatsenko on February 25, 2022. The reason for her words was the initiative of the city council to allocate funds for SRW and the recording of the treatment with a pro-Ukrainian position in the very first days of the war.
Since that time, Anton Yatsenko has actually been waging an information war against Pletneva on his official Facebook page.
If before the war the people's deputy openly promoted Pletnev, reposted her video about work in Uman, etc., then last year everything changed rapidly - the parliamentarian accused the Uman city authorities of corruption and negligence. And it wasn’t just Pletneva who was beaten up by a deputy from the Cherkasy region. So, now the head of the OVA, Igor Taburets, is also suing Mr. Yatsenko. However, the people's representative himself ignores court hearings.
“On his Facebook page, the people’s deputy makes statements that are clearly borderline or clearly cross some line of morality, ethics and business reputation. Unfortunately, today's meeting was disrupted by representatives of the defendant, Mr. Yatsenko. A failure to appear, about which for some reason neither the court nor you and I were informed,” comments lawyer Evgeniy Dyadyuk, representing Taburets’ side.
In general, as court records show, Mr. Yatsenko is a rather impulsive and conflict-ridden person.
Only now the servants of Themis are considering a number of lawsuits to protect honor and reputation and refute false information.
And this is not a new trend. Many years ago, ATO officer from Uman Oleg Gervas for a long time, hard, but successfully sued Yatsenko because of an offensive comment on the same Facebook.
“We broke his schemes, muddies. He lived well under all the authorities, even under Yanukovych, when he was in the Party of Regions. The Maidan and all the tragic events that happened after this took it off a little from some streams. And he took revenge on us, on everyone: it doesn’t matter who you are - an ATO soldier, a Maidan activist, for Ukraine or against Ukraine. The main thing is that he took revenge on everyone who removed him from these streams,” says Gervas.
Regarding the people’s deputy’s conflict with the head of Uman, our interlocutor agrees that Yatsenko is taking revenge for being separated from his influence: “She simply began to fulfill her function as mayor and perform it as needed. Not in the interests of the deputy, but in the interests of the citizens. And that’s it – she became bad.”
The same line of conflict can be clearly seen in the work of the people’s deputy.
The main activity of parliamentarians is rule-making. But throughout last year, Yatsenko single-handedly initiated only one bill, No. 7436. In August 2022, he proposed depriving people’s deputies of benefits, compensation and reducing salaries to the official minimum until martial law ends. According to the people's deputy, this document seemed to be blocked by the leadership of the Verkhovna Rada.
So the bill did not move beyond the idea. However, it was scattered with a good wave of information PR. But there is a “nuance”.
“We made a corresponding request to the BP apparatus. And it turned out that in the same August 2022, Yatsenko himself received compensation in the amount of almost 50 thousand hryvnia and 7,500 hryvnia for transport. Moreover. This year, the monthly compensation increased by another 4 thousand, with the same 7.5 thousand, as they say, “for the road,” says Igor Khmury.
Last October, Yatsenko unexpectedly changed the parliamentary committee: instead of ecology, he decided to take care of local governments. And he has already submitted as many as eight bills. True, none of them brought any results. And their direction raises many questions amid the conflict with the mayor of Uman.
In particular, Yatsenko tried to change the mechanism for recalling city chairmen and local deputies, increasing the period for collecting signatures and changing the required number.
In addition, during his entire current tenure, Yatsenko made 115 parliamentary requests. Of these, 91 went to local governments. And the “lion’s share” is specifically about Ms. Pletneva, Mr. Taburts and potentially related topics.
The parliamentarian does not refuse to put pressure on opponents and their families over military registration and enlistment offices.
For example, he initiated criminal proceedings against Pletneva’s son for falsifying a disability. And this is not a rare case, says lawyer Yana Krokhmaleva. In the end, because of one of these episodes, the people’s deputy himself already ran into problems with the law.
“Taking into account the fact that Mr. Yatsenko knowingly filed an unreliable statement of crime regarding evasion of mobilization, the investigating judge of the Pechersky District Court was obliged by the State Bureau of Investigation to enter information into the Unified State Register of Pre-trial Investigations, that is, to actually initiate a criminal case against Yatsenko and carry out a pre-trial investigation on this fact,” the lawyer said.
What is the further fate of the criminal case from the State Bureau of Investigation?
While this investigation was being prepared for publication, Yatsenko received a response from the State Bureau of Investigation, which is trying to “force” it in the media as much as possible. They say that the case about “Zhdun,” which was opened because of Pletneva’s words about “Kyiv in three days,” has been closed, and the police are investigating a statement of slander against the people’s deputy.
But there are several nuances, the investigative journalist notes.
“Firstly, the materials distributed indicate that Yatsenko was a witness in the case. Secondly, the case was closed a month and a half ago, and active distribution began only the other day. Thirdly, such accusations are more likely to be within the powers of the SBU and NSDC, rather than the SBI. And Mrs. Pletneva assured us in a telephone conversation that the fight continues and the old decision of the State Bureau of Investigation will not stop it,” he notes.
So what are we talking about? After all, fighting corruption and fighting for transparency using powers is, of course, good. But does this fight ultimately come down to settling personal scores? We will continue to monitor events in the Cherkasy region and will cover new details.
