The mayor of Mykolaiv asked journalists to carefully follow the purchases of the city council and look for «schemes and themes»

Mykolaiv City Mayor Oleksandr Sienkevych appealed to journalists to carefully analyze purchases made by the structural units of the City Council.

The mayor said this on January 4, during a press conference on the results of work in 2023, writes NikVesti.

«The mass media today have a great responsibility, including supporting people psychologically. And you also have a responsibility to follow local self-government bodies. I am in favor of you looking at these tenders and purchases, finding some schemes and topics there. We will expose all this together with you, check and hand it over to the law enforcement officers. I have no intention of engaging in such a thing or supporting those who engage in it,» Oleksandr Sienkevych said.

During his report, the mayor talked about the work in the direction

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«Our task is to build a system with our politicians, rules at utility companies, in administrations for everyone who uses the funds,» Oleksandr Sienkevych said.

He informed that an integrity assessment of KP «Mykolaivvodokanal» and an update of procurement processes at this enterprise are currently underway. This is done by the auditing company Deloitte.

«We are also engaged in improving the work of the department of internal financial control, supervision and anti-corruption and transferring it from the fact that it dismantles or repairs something to the one that simply conducts procurement analysis, makes recommendations, blocks and conducts audits of utility companies and individual units of the city council,» said the mayor of Mykolaiv.

The city management also plans to improve the qualifications of officials responsible for public procurement.

«Sometimes the problem is that people, not having any desire to earn something and having no influence on the final result in the form of concluding contracts, payments, etc., make some mistakes that increase the cost of the final result,» Oleksandr Sienkevych said.

The mayor of Mykolaiv gave an example of effective cooperation of the city council with the media regarding the control of public procurement.

«And here I would like to single out your work. It is very important, and we have an example just recently, when one of the publications conducted a procurement analysis, provided this information, we contacted them with the department of internal financial control. They worked through the question that the journalist found, and found a number of problems and nuances there. And we corrected this purchase by the time we settled with the contractor. In this regard, an official inspection of this person who made the purchase was scheduled. I understand that, based on the results of the investigation, we will apply disciplinary action to these people,» said the mayor of Mykolaiv.

Judging by the words of the city mayor, we are talking about the purchase of refrigerators for kindergartens and schools, which was carried out by the city education department the day before. The Slidstvo.Info publication analyzed the purchase and found an attempt to overestimate the cost of the equipment by almost two times. After communicating with Slidstvo.Info journalists, another agreement was concluded, where the cost of the refrigerators already amounted to 22,000 hryvnias. In this way, the Mykolaiv City Council avoided an overpayment of 764,000 hryvnias.

We will remind you that recently the publication «Nashi Hroshi» analyzed the tender for the restoration of the Mykolaiv Gymnasium No. 2 worth more than 146 million hryvnias and declared that the prices in the estimate were overstated. According to the publication, expensive detectors and putty were included in the estimate of the gymnasium's restoration.

Previously, the publication «Nashi Hroshi» analyzed the purchases of the Department of Town Planning, Architecture, Capital Construction and Development Project Support of the Mykolaiv Regional Military Administration for the reconstruction of the water main in Mykolaiv with a total cost of 836 million hryvnias, and stated that the prices were inflated by 2-3 times. The head of the RMA Vitalii Kim, in turn, promised to account for every penny spent.