A cool spring evening, the village of Malechkovychi, the suburbs of Lviv. Andrii Kavetskyi, a 41-year-old head of the Chief Department of the StateGeoCadastre in the Lviv region, drives a BMW M760LI, heading into the yard of his house. He closes the gates, takes a piece of cloth out of the car, and uses it to cover his licence plate. One can only wonder what he feels at this moment: a bout of paranoia, anxiety, or, on the contrary, the confidence in his impunity.
Kavetskyi’s house is registered in his mother-in-law’s name, his BMW – in the name of a close friend. He declares neither the house nor the premium-class vehicle, though the law requires it.
Andrii Kavetskyi takes his phone, calls his friend, and tells him about a trick with the cloth. “Well, I knew it would come to this sooner or later,” he explains. “So I park my cars at home and cover the plates with the cloth! And everybody used to laugh at me. Because, if a car enters the yard, and you want to take a picture of the plate, there is a cloth, and you can’t do that.”
At that moment, Kavetskyi is fully aware that the NACP is checking his lifestyle within the criminal case, initiated by the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI). He knows that his questionable orders as the main land official of the region are being examined as well, and his undeclared property will be found sooner or later… But he still hopes that he can fool everybody.
Several months later, Andrii Kavetsyi was arrested in Kyiv, while attempting to bribe the NACP employee. On the way to this meeting, he switched his phone off and changed cars, explaining it by his “trusting nobody”. It turned out that the NACP employee came to this meeting under the cover of the SBI investigators, so Kavetskyi’s intuition was spot on.
The story with the bribe and the hidden property of Kavetskyi’s family is just one of the twists in the SBI case. All these undeclared assets and vehicles had to come from somewhere. And it looks like the land decisions, made by Andrii Kavetskyi, are the most obvious source of enrichment. Judging by the bail of almost UAH 90 mln, set by the court, he surely has the money. However, according to the data of NGL.media, he didn’t pay the bail and has been in the ward of the pre-trial detention centre for almost two months.
Meanwhile, the scheme under investigation by the Ukrainian law enforcement bodies is rather typical. The state land is given away for free to some straw parties, then the plots are quickly divided into smaller pieces and re-sold so that each transaction looks ordinary and random, from the outside.
So while Andrii Kavetskyi is awaiting his trial behind bars, NGL.media decided to get to the bottom of the land part of this case.
Kavetskyi’s case
The SBI case features one land plot with an area of two hectares which was allocated with severe violations. At the same time, the privatization document was signed by Andrii Kavetskyi personally.
This land plot is located in the mountainous area near the popular resort of Skhidnytsia in the Lviv region, on a high hill above the village of Novyi Kropyvnyk, which is a part of the Skhidnytsia territorial community. On the one side, the plot borders an ancient Carpathian forest, and on the other, it offers a breathtaking panoramic view of the Stryi valley and the neighbouring mountain ranges.
A land plot of two hectares within Novyi Kropyvnyk, which features in Kavetskyi’s case, and the panoramic view from it (a photo by NGL.media)
In a conversation with NGL.media, land experts said that the market value of this plot is at least USD 100 thousand, mainly because of the views it offers. However, after connecting all the required utilities, building a proper road, and rezoning this land for construction, its cost could rise even to USD 500 thousand.
In 2021, the Chief Department of the StateGeoCadastre in the Lviv region allocated this land plot to 19-year-old Oleksandr Holubev from Lviv “for operating a personal farm” free of charge. It is noteworthy that the order on land allocation, signed by Andrii Kavetskyi, is unnumbered, and according to the data of the SBI, it wasn’t registered in the system of documents of the StateGeoCadastre which may indicate the forgery of documents.
Further manipulations with the plot confirm these assumptions. Three months later, Holubev allegedly sold two hectares of land for UAH 45.5 thousand to Pavlo Vyhovskyi, Kavetskyi’s friend. Holubev didn’t even take part in this sale – his interests were represented by a lawyer, Roman Bazarnyk, a former colleague of Pavlo Vyhovskyi, who had worked with him in Koudijs Ukraine, a company, producing feed for animals.
In this photo we circled Pavlo Vyhovskyi in yellow, and Roman Bazarnyk – in green.
These circumstances lead to the thought that 19-year-old Oleksandr Holubev was a straw party in this transaction to avoid a direct connection between the free-of-charge allocation of land and its acquisition by a close friend of the head of the State GeoCadastre. This is what might have happened. But there is one little detail: the contact data of his father, Andrii Holubev, is often registered as “Andrii SSU” which may demonstrate the involvement of people from the law enforcement structures in this scheme. Andrii Holubev didn’t respond to the request of NGL.media for comments, and his son refused to talk. “I have already been interrogated by the SBI, I have no right to tell anything,” Oleksandr Holubev said.
Anyway, the land plot with the size of almost three football fields in a prestigious resort area was bought by Pavlo Vyhovskyi for mere UAH 45.5 thousand, or USD 1,700 As of the moment of signing the sale agreement, on September 14, 2021, the NBU currency exchange rate was UAH 47.1 per one dollar of the USA. This is dozens of times lower than the market value – agricultural plots in this area are estimated at USD 70,000–90,000.
The location of Pavlo Vyhovskyi’s land plot near Novyi Kropyvnyk
The fact that Pavlo Vyhovskyi is close to Andrii Kavetskyi is confirmed not only by the land deal but also by the fact that Kavetskyi registered two Audi cars in Vyhovskyi’s name and drove them himself for several years.
Pavlo Vyhovskyi
41-year-old Pavlo Vyhovskyi is a registered lawyer in the town of Dubliany which is a part of the Lviv MTC. He is a sole entrepreneur in the field of law.
Open sources show that Pavlo Vyhovskyi was the director of Koudijs Ukraine and the financial director of Agrol agroholding. Both companies belong to the family of Yulia and Fedir Shopsky, agricultural businessmen from Lviv.
According to the data of the investigation, his official income doesn’t cover even basic living expenses, let alone premium cars, worth almost UAH 5.3 mln.
It is noteworthy that after the registration of Audi Q8 in his name, Vyhovskyi had a power of attorney issued to Kavetskyi’s wife to drive the vehicle for three years. And the correspondence, extracted by the investigators from the phone of Kavetskyi’s mother-in-law, contains the photo of the same car on the day of its registration in Vyhovskyi’s name and the photo of the registration certificate with a new licence plate.
Previously we have told about Kavetskyi’s habit to have vehicles registered in his friends’ names in detail.
Several weeks later, Pavlo Vyhovskyi divided his two hectares into 12 plots of different areas and started selling them.
A very profitable business
Now this territory is covered in deep grass, bushes, and rare trees. 42 hundred square metres here still belong to Pavlo Vyhovskyi. As for the rest of the land, he sold it at a price 20 times exceeding the one he had bought it for and earned a total of UAH 775.8 This is proven by land sale agreements which are at NGL.media’s disposal. At the same time, the sale price was still far below the market value. So, the most interesting part of this story relates to those who finally got these plots.
For instance, 56-year-old Romana Holod, the mother of Yurii Holod, the temporary head of the Lviv regional council. She bought 10 hundred square metres for UAH 85 thousand in October 2022. And in 2025, after the SBI investigation started, she resold this plot for UAH 110 thousand to her former subordinate, Solomia Bilous Yurii Holod’s parents own a polygraphic enterprise, PE Romus-Poligraph, where Solomia Bilous used to work and where her husband, Andrii Bilous, is working now. This is clear from the income statement of Solomia Bilous as a deputy of Dobrosynsko-Maherivska village council. The connection looks too convenient to be random. Yet, Yurii Holod argues the opposite.
“My mother is an independent adult who takes her own decisions regarding her property and finances. I wasn’t a party to the land sale agreement, I didn’t finance its acquisition, I didn’t get any profit from this transaction and had no arrangements about this land with Andrii Kavetskyi, Pavlo Vyhovskyi, or whoever else,” Yurii Holod responded to NGL.media’s inquiry.
In a photo – the temporary head of the Lviv regional council, Yurii Holod, with his mother, Romana Holod (a photo from the Facebook account of Yurii Holod)
“According to my mother’s words, she learned about the sale of this plot from her other acquaintances, and prior to the moment of signing the documents, she didn’t know who it actually belonged to. Solomia Bilous was looking for a plot, suggested buying it, and the sale also took place at a usual/market price as of the moment of the sale and involved the relevant experts’ reports,” the head of the Lviv regional council added.
Ten hundred square metres were acquired by Yulia Kondrat – the co-owner of the real estate companies, including Grand-Palace LLC, which is a part of the group of companies, owned by the relatives of Orest Salamakha, a former people’s deputy from “Sluha Narodu” [The Servant of the People] party – Taras Salamakha and Volodymyr Dorosh. Yulia Kondrat paid Vyhovsky UAH 25 thousand at the beginning of 2023 and last November, she re-sold it to Oleh Sichevskyi for UAH 445 thousand.
Among other landowners are the former lawyer of the companies of the oligarch Petro Dyminskyi, Vadym Ladnytskyi; the dean of the Law Faculty of the Lviv University of Trade and Economics, Oleksandr Kotukha; a businessman from Lviv, Ihor Heizer; a property developer from Kyiv, Oleksandr Diatlenko, and a shipping company owner, Taras Bishchuk. All of them either didn’t answer NGL.media’s questions or gave elusive answers. For instance, Ihor Heizer said that he had found a plot “via the acquaintances of acquaintances” and intended to develop it, but changed his mind, “Well, what do you mean, why was it bought? Well, probably, there were some plans, and at present, they aren’t relevant… Because some circumstances have changed in life.”
Criminal investigations
Along with the SBI’s investigation, another criminal investigation regarding land schemes in Novyi Kropyvnyk was initiated by the police this January. The investigators from the Environmental Crimes Department of the National Police in the Lviv region suspect that the scheme may have a large scale and involve neighbouring plots as well. At present, the police investigators are checking the hypothesis which is practically the same as that of their SBI colleagues: did Andrii Kavetskyi abuse power by allocating a land plot in a resort area free of charge? Another question could be added here: will he be punished?
In almost 10 years of holding his position of the head of the Chief Department of the StateGeoCadastre in the Lviv region, Andrii Kavetskyi featured in criminal land-related cases three times, and there were three attempts to fire him, yet with no success. The most high-profile case was related to an attempt to transfer almost 27 hectares of land near Lviv worth UAH 113 mln to private owners; in November 2024, he was acquitted by the court.
So, with this experience, Kavetskyi could have been confident that he would be lucky in the case related to the land plot near Skhidnytsia as well. This is confirmed by the fragments of Kavetskyi’s conversations with his friends, quoted in the court rulings. These were telephone conversations, recorded several months prior to Kavetskyi’s detention for the bribe, when he already knew about the criminal investigation.
According to the investigators’ version, Kavetskyi and his wife acquired four premium cars, worth a total of over UAH 11.5 mln: two Audi Q8, Audi S8, and BMW M7. NGL.media also found Jaguar XJ 2017 and Lexus LS 600h 2013. Neither of these cars is registered in Kavetskyi’s name, the official owners of the cars are his friends and acquaintances.
Prior to 2023, Andrii Kavetskyi submitted almost empty declarations where he stated only his income. And he was lucky – his declarations were never taken by the NACP for any checks. Yet, it was evident that hiding the property was his deliberate decision. And it is not only about cars. Previously, NGL.media found out that a two-story estate in Malechkovychi, where, as we assumed, the Kavetskyis actually live, is registered in his mother-in-law’s name. At the same time, the main land official of the Lviv region states in his declarations that he toughs it out together with his family in a single-room apartment in Lviv.
These days, the rulings have been published in the court register which make it obvious that this is not just an assumption. The SBI investigators extracted the records from the dashboard camera, found during the search of the address in Malechkovychi. It shows that Kavetskyi himself and his wife leave and enter the yard every day. The same records also feature the cars which they cautiously registered in their friends’ names and covered their licence plates with cloths.
It seems like this time it will be difficult to come out unscathed. If that’s even possible.
The author Kateryna Rodak, the editor Oleh Onysko, translation Nelya Plakhota
