The Mykolaiv City Council is demanding a report from the anti-corruption department following an investigation into the procurement of electric transport

Following the publication of a report on the procurement of cable for the electric transport system, councillors will hear a report from the anti-corruption department. Photo: NikVesti archive

Andrii Yantar, a councillor on Mykolaiv City Council elected as a member of the «Propozytsiia» party, proposed that the council hear a report from the Internal Financial Control Department following journalistic investigations into possible financial irregularities at municipal enterprises.

He made this statement during a session of the Mykolaiv City Council on 30 July, according to NikVesti.

According to the councillor, journalistic investigations into possible financial irregularities at enterprises and institutions funded by the city budget have been appearing with increasing frequency in the media and on social media recently.

As an example, he cited a report by the publication «Nashi Hroshi» regarding the intention of the municipal enterprise «Mykolaivelektrotrans» to purchase copper cable at a significantly inflated price.

«An entire department is funded from the local budget, which is tasked with combating corruption and economic crimes in the city of Mykolaiv. It is this department that should be dealing with these issues, not journalists, as its staff receive salaries, bonuses and allowances from the local budget,» said Andrii Yantar.

In this regard, the councillor proposed inviting Vitalii Yaroshenko, the acting director of the Department of Internal Financial Control, Supervision and Anti-Corruption, to the next plenary session to hear a public report on the department’s performance, in particular regarding the number of audits carried out, the materials forwarded to law enforcement agencies, the outcomes of their review, as well as information on the remuneration of the department’s staff and indicators of its performance.

In addition, the councillor proposed inviting the director of the municipal enterprise «Mykolaivelektrotrans» to provide an explanation regarding the procurement of copper cable.

The Mayor, Oleksandr Sienkevych, supported this proposal and issued a formal instruction to invite the acting director of the Department of Internal Financial Control, Supervision and Anti-Corruption, as well as the head of the municipal enterprise «Mykolaivelektrotrans», to the next session so that they could answer the councillors’ questions.

What is known about the «Mykolaivelektrotrans» procurement

As a reminder, journalists from «Nashi Hroshi» discovered that the municipal enterprise «Mykolaivelektrotrans» had signed a contract to purchase cables and wires worth 3.86 million hryvnias from «Time-Elektroservis» LLC, which had been registered just one month before the agreement was signed.

The investigation states that the municipal enterprise planned to purchase some of the cabling products at prices one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half times higher than those offered by major suppliers and the prices of similar purchases by other state-owned enterprises. According to journalists’ calculations, had the goods been purchased at market prices, the city could have saved at least 500,000 hryvnias.

Following the publication, Yurii Smetana, director of the municipal enterprise «Mykolaivelektrotrans», told NikVesti that the company had reviewed the procurement and agreed that certain items had turned out to be more expensive than market prices.

«We have reviewed the most recent tenders — both those mentioned in the article and others. And we saw that there are indeed items which we had planned to buy for less than the market price, whilst others are more expensive,» said Yurii Smetana.

According to him, the company asked the supplier to reduce prices to the level indicated in the journalistic analysis. However, the supplier refused to do so.

«We are now terminating the contract and will re-advertise the procurement on ProZorro. We very much hope that there will be bidders willing to take part in the auction and that we will indeed be able to make further savings,» added the director of the municipal enterprise.

It should be noted that during the first half of 2026, prosecutors in the Mykolaiv region referred 922 indictments to the courts. These included dozens of cases involving corruption, offences relating to public finances, drug trafficking, as well as evasion of military conscription and the illegal smuggling of men across the state border.