Logistics collapse in a front-line city? In Nikolaev, due to the lack of gas, public and municipal transport risks stopping, because the only working methane gas station... was closed. The reason is bureaucratic “arbitrariness” and the actions of the company under the leadership of the lustrated ex-prosecutor of the Yanukovych era, Yuriy Paliy.
How is this possible, what is the threat to the social infrastructure, and what does the former Nikolaev prosecutor, who managed to “light up” in corruption scandals, have to do with it?
The Ukrgaz gas station in the vicinity of the shipbuilders town has been operating since 2016. On the eve of the full-scale invasion, it was one of three in Nikolaev, but with the outbreak of hostilities in the south it remained the only one. The gas station continued to operate despite the shelling, because the operation of a large number of minibuses and public transport in the regional center depended on the presence of methane.
However, in the fall of 2022, a problem unexpectedly arose with the functioning of a critical facility.
“At that time, the license for gas distribution in Firtash’s company expired, and this right was transferred to the newly formed structure of Naftogaz - Gas Distribution Systems of Ukraine LLC. The legal entity of the gas station tenant has also changed. Therefore, a simple bureaucratic procedure for concluding a new agreement was relevant,” comments journalist Igor Khmury.
But this procedure seemed simple only at first glance.
As the representative of the Ukrgaz company Sergei Bogza said, on October 26 the company submitted an application to change the legal entity - in the code of gas distribution systems this sounds like “change of personalized data.”
“According to the current legislation and the code of gas distribution systems, we should have been connected to gas equipment as a new legal entity within ten days. But this did not happen and all this was postponed by all means. And on November 13, we were completely disconnected from the gas distribution system mechanically,” notes Bogza.
According to him, the representatives of the gas station didn’t even want to explain what was happening.
Then a version emerged that the pipe was cut because businessmen were unauthorizedly taking gas without permission. Then the versions replaced each other. Then it was about some kind of plug that someone tore off, although it was located outside the gas station. Then they did not want to conclude the agreement, seemingly due to lack of documents. When we received them, nothing happened anyway.
“At first they demanded a statement of balance sheet ownership, which was generally done several years ago and this is not a mandatory document for concluding a distribution agreement. We prepared it and submitted the documents again. But there was no result either,” notes lawyer Anton Bilyaev.
Anton considers the nominal reason for the shutdown to be nonsense. Because, according to him, the company itself was the first to ask in writing to stop gas supplies.
“A priori there could not have been an unauthorized connection, because gas supplies were stopped precisely on our initiative. That is, at the end of October last year we sent a request to disconnect us from the gas network due to changes in personalized data,” he emphasizes.
How did events develop further?
As gas station employees say, one day equipment arrived at the gas station again, this time an excavator. Under the pretext of a gas leak, the crew dug a large trench, damaging the asphalt, green area and curbs. Of course, they never found any leak. At the request of Ukrgaz, the hole was buried, but other consequences were left as is.
The stoppage of the gas station resulted in a real transport collapse in Nikolaev. After all, after the start of a full-scale invasion, this was the last methane gas station in the front-line regional center.
Many local websites wrote about the problem. They say that there are long queues at stops, and the intervals between flights are growing. And all because on some routes the majority of “buses” simply had nothing to ride on.
In addition to minibuses, the Ukrgaz gas station has other social obligations to customers.
Therefore, when it became clear that the situation was dragging on, we had to look for workarounds.
“We decided to simply transport gas from other regions in order to support the citizens and support our public utilities that cooperate with us. Currently, these are Nikolaevkommuntrans and KP, which are engaged in waste removal in Nikolaev. Among the municipal ones, these are also several medical ambulances, which were transferred by volunteer organizations to the city and with which we also currently have agreements, according to which we must supply them with fuel,” says a company representative.
Of course, the new scheme for supplying scarce fuel has already affected the final cost and volumes of fuel. So, it won’t be possible to always be blocked by an alternative to a cut pipe. After all, the closest alternative is in Voznesensk - almost a hundred kilometers from the regional center.
So at whose “initiation” did the gas conflict arise in Nikolaev?
The company Gas Distribution Networks of Ukraine LLC, which replaced Firtash’s regional gas companies in the regions, was registered in the fall of 2022. The owner of the enterprise, through its legal subsidiary, is the state-owned Naftogaz.
The new networks have regional branches, including in Nikolaev. The head of the local branch is Vitaly Lazarenko. But the head of the security department, who directly manages the issues of disconnection from networks, is Yuri Paliy.
In the city, Paliy is known as the former prosecutor of Nikolaev. During his prosecutorial career, Yuri Vasilyevich appeared in many scandals.
“Either his brother somehow brazenly built a shopping center on city land, or even the prosecutor himself was accused of protecting the mafia of the MAFs of the whole city and beyond. They also criticized Paliya for lying in his declarations and accusing his structure of putting pressure on the IT business. And his brother – in attempts to racketeer on the local market,” comments journalist Igor Khmury.
As a prosecutor, Paliy was also noted in some high-profile criminal cases.
The high-profile case of Oksana Makar deserves special attention. Let us remind you that three young men raped and set a girl on fire. She later died in the hospital, but not before giving the names of her executioners. They tried to “get rid of” two of them and immediately let them go, because their parents had a certain influence. This caused a number of protests throughout Ukraine. The protesters in Nikolaev claimed that it was the prosecutor’s office of Paliya who resisted their actions.
But after the Revolution of Dignity, Yuri Vasilyevich fell under lustration. But not completely. He lost his position as the city's chief prosecutor, but did not leave the law enforcement agencies.
First, somehow he managed to transfer to the regional prosecutor’s office to the position of chief supervisor of the unified register of pre-trial investigations, which he held until April 24, 2020.
After this, Mr. Paliy was transferred as chief lawyer to the Administration of Sea Ports of Ukraine. There, judging by the declarations, he worked until 2023. Moreover, with a good salary: in 2022, he officially earned more than a million hryvnia from the USPA. But in 2023, as the declaration shows, he received 30 thousand hryvnia of the balance from the ports, 235 thousand from Nikolaevgaz and more than 100 thousand from his current position in the branch of Gas Distribution Networks of Ukraine LLC.
By a strange coincidence, it was with the transfer of the ex-prosecutor that problems began in relations between the Ukrgaz gas station and the gas supplier.
It is also noteworthy that when, after “lustration,” Yuri Paliy moved to the chair of the head of the department of the regional prosecutor’s office, his wife opened her own law firm, “Southern Legal Bureau.”
But when Paliy moved to the Sea Ports Administration in April 2020, a month later his wife transferred her company to Kherson resident Oksana Shtrigel. The latter increased its authorized capital by almost 3.5 million hryvnia, changed the name and KVEDs, turning the legal company into an agricultural firm.
It’s interesting that back in March of the same year, this same Oksana Shtrigel was caught on the streets of Kherson for... illegally selling fish out of hand.
Meanwhile, representatives of the gas station have already complained to the head office of Gas Distribution Networks of Ukraine LLC and NEURC.
We have not yet received any responses to the complaints filed. Representatives of the StopKor editorial office also sent a corresponding request to its subsidiary Naftogaz LLC. One copy was sent by email, and the journalists decided to personally deliver the other to the official address.
However, the guard at the turnstile assured the media workers that Gas Distribution Networks did not sit here, and sent them to look for an office somewhere near the Teatralnaya metro station.
“They couldn’t tell us the exact address, and we couldn’t find it on the website either. We will, of course, wait for a response to the request, or we will contact Naftogaz higher up. Because we are very interested in the principle on which a state-owned enterprise LLC hired such a well-known person in Nikolaev. And how do the heads of Naftogaz generally look at the situation when they “break down” the last methane gas station of a long-suffering front-line city,” sums up Igor Khmury.
Let us remind you that the StopCor team exposed a possible “scheme” with heat supply in Kamenskoye in the Dnepropetrovsk region. Multimillion-dollar payments during 2020-2022 were received from utility companies and city residents by a company from the orbit of the godfather of the mayor, Andrei Bilousov.
