A business registered in the name of his son-in-law, parents with Russian citizenship, and regular trips to Moscow - and these are not all the secrets of Verkhovna Rada deputy Vitaly Bort.
A business registered in the name of his son-in-law, parents with Russian citizenship, and regular trips to Moscow - and these are not all the secrets of Verkhovna Rada deputy Vitaly Bort. But, despite all the scandals and possible violations, the people’s deputy managed to “safeguard” and win a road tender for UAH 61 million. What is the parliamentarian hiding and how is his family connected to the Russian Federation?
Despite the fact that the OPZZh party is banned, representatives of this political force still influence lawmaking in Ukraine as members of parliament. The real motives of the activities of some deputies raise questions, and the people's deputies themselves become subjects of high-profile media investigations.
In particular, last month a resonant publication of “Schemes” was published: investigative journalists of the project discovered that OPZHist Vitaly Bort repeatedly traveled to annexed Crimea, and even through the territory of the aggressor country.
As the media note, according to information from Russian air travel databases, Vitaly Bort repeatedly flew from Simferopol to Russia and returned to the occupied peninsula.
Systematic trips to occupied Crimea
According to information from Russian air travel databases, which is published in the Schemes material, people’s deputy from the banned Opposition Platform for Life party Vitaly Bort has traveled to the temporarily occupied Crimea through Russia at least four times since 2014, that is, in violation of Ukrainian legislation.
On August 15, 2014, when Bort was a people's deputy of the 7th convocation, he went from Kyiv to Moscow, landed at Domodedovo airport and flew to Simferopol on the same day. Four days later, on August 19, the deputy again flew from Crimea to Moscow and returned to Kyiv on the same day without transfers.
On April 12, 2015, Vitaly Bort flew from Rostov-on-Don airport to Simferopol. Later that year, on June 26, he flew from Simferopol to Moscow.
On September 10, 2015, Vitaly again traveled to the Russian capital, taking a direct flight from Kyiv. Four days later, on September 14, he flew from Simferopol to Sheremetyevo Airport. From Moscow he returned by plane to Kyiv the next day.
The board made another flight in the direction from Russia to Crimea on March 24, 2016 - from Moscow Domodedovo Airport to Simferopol, as evidenced by data from Russian air travel databases.
Please note that according to the rules introduced in April 2014 in accordance with Ukrainian laws, entry into and leaving occupied Crimea is permitted only through Ukrainian checkpoints.
In addition, according to data on border crossings, Bort and his relatives repeatedly crossed the administrative border with occupied Crimea through the Kalanchak checkpoint in 2018-2019. For example, the people’s deputy was in Crimea during the “celebration” of sacred dates for the aggressor country: Yalta Day (second Saturday of August), Russia Day (June 12, 2018) and the pseudo holiday “Day of the Reunification of Crimea with Russia” (18 March 2019).
The people's deputy's mother is a citizen of the Russian Federation: true or false?
Probably, in 2019, the mother of people’s deputy Valentina Bort received Russian citizenship, as evidenced by an extract from the Rospassport system, and his father most likely has a Russian taxpayer number linked to his Ukrainian passport.
Using the website of the Russian Tax Service, it was possible to establish the individual tax number of the taxpayer in Russia, linked to Valentina Bort’s passport.
In addition, in 2014, Bort was detained in Yalta by employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation for participating in a gangster gathering.
Bort and his family also continue to do business with the families of former Crimean Prime Minister Vasily Dzharty, ex-People's Deputy Sergei Buryak and ex-head of Ukravtodor Slawomir Novak.
It should be recalled that on April 14, 2014, after the start of Russia’s aggression in the East of Ukraine, Vitaly Bort was present at a meeting of the Makeyevka City Council, where the so-called “people’s mayor” was “elected” the day before.
On April 14, 2014, at an extraordinary session of the City Council, deputies, including Bort, unanimously decided to support the holding of a separatist referendum. Moreover, the deputies created a public council, which should organize it. Among the council members were members of the “DPR” group, who openly called for the liquidation of Ukrainian statehood and the annexation of Donbass to Russia.
Also in the video released on April 22, 2014, Bort stated that there are no separatists in Makeyevka, but “people who express their point of view, probably not in the way that one can express it.”
However, Vitaly Bort’s probable connections with the Russian Federation and crime did not prevent him from receiving millions of government contracts in Ukraine.
Scandalous tender involving a deputy
The Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine has been unable to consider a complaint about collusion between two companies associated with MP Vitaly Bort for two and a half years. In December 2020, the NGO “Anti-Corruption Roadblock” drew the committee’s attention to the coordinated actions of firms during tenders for road construction. However, I still have not received a response. These companies continue to participate in public procurement, and perhaps right now the money is being transferred to the pocket of the people’s deputy, who openly loves Russia.
It all started with a tender for the overhaul of 2.5 km of the Stryi-Znamenka road in the Kirovograd region, where journalists drew attention to the strange behavior of two participants - DS Prom Group LLC (39810010) and LLC (42406672). The companies seem to have acted in collusion, and ZTS could take part in the purchase precisely in order to “insure” the DS Prom company, which ultimately won this tender for UAH 61 million.
The State Audit Service, by the way, also discovered violations in this procurement, namely: “The tender documentation was not drawn up in accordance with the requirements of the law.”
However, the signs of a conspiracy turned out to be so obvious because of obvious “blunders”. For example, in one of the documents, the ZTS company used the document “DS Prom” as a template and forgot to replace the name of the competitor in the text, in this form, and uploaded the official tender documentation to the Prozorro website.
The companies also submitted two identical letters of guarantee that were not required by the documentation - the texts differed only in the names of the companies, details and signatures of the directors. Other signs of probable collusion include almost simultaneous uploading of documents to the site outside of working hours an hour before the deadline, simultaneous filing of similar complaints, etc.
LLC “DS Prom”
LLC "ZTS GROUP"
At the same time, the ZTS company, it seems, did not even intend to win: it did not provide a bank guarantee, and intended to rent the asphalt plant and laboratory from DS Prom Group. In short, the signs of a conspiracy are visible to the naked eye.
Who is the head of the Antimonopoly Committee Olga Pishchanskaya “protecting” by delaying the consideration of the complaint?
The answer will surprise you: this is the business of the people’s deputy from the banned OPZZh Vitaly Bort. After all, both companies involved in that scandalous tender in the Kirovograd region are directly related to the deputy.
The founder of ZTS Group LLC, both then and now, is Andrey Viktorovich Shcherban.
This is the son-in-law of Vitaly Bort, the husband of his daughter Yana Bort-Shcherban. Andrey, Yana, as well as Bort’s wife Olga and father-in-law (wife’s father) Anatoly Trandafilov, for example, together financed Alexander Popov’s election campaign in Kyiv in 2020.
DS Prom Group LLC is also included in the orbit of Vitaly Bort. Journalists found the people's deputy's connection with the company through his wife Olga back in 2018. Moreover, Bort himself noted in his biography before the 2019 elections that he is the deputy director of DS Prom Group LLC for economics.
In the mid-to-late 2010s, the police investigated two criminal proceedings against DS Prom Group. In one case, according to investigators, a company associated with Bort purchased real estate from the Kiev Regional Road Administration utility company, paying 12 million instead of 25 million for it.
Thus, it turns out that Olga Peschanskaya, the head of the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine, has actually been ignoring the issue of bringing to justice an obvious sympathizer of Russia and a person involved in crime for two and a half years.
It is also noteworthy that in 2020, Vitaly Bort became one of the initiators of a submission to the Constitutional Court on the compliance of a number of provisions of anti-corruption legislation with the Constitution - on the abolition of mandatory declaration.
So, Vitaly Bort, now a people’s deputy from the “Platform for Life and Peace” party (formerly banned “Opposition Platform for Life”), despite the fact that the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine has been going on for more than a year and a half, has not been able to get rid of connections with the aggressor country. In addition, the deputy continues to conduct shadow business and enrich his fortune while other Ukrainians help the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
