Svetlichnaya Yulia: the story of the Kharkiv ex-governor, kept woman. PART 2

CONTINUED. BEGINNING: Yulia Svetlichnaya: the story of the Kharkiv governor-kept woman. PART 1

This farce looked simply disgusting, so a few days later Svetlichnaya decided to try to calm the outraged public with a “ritual sacrifice” – and she chose the Department of Ecology and Natural Resources of the Regional State Administration as the scapegoat, which she… abolished. Of course, there were reasons for this: the Department’s officials had become so lazy and arrogant that they did not show up for work, did not respond to requests, and did not want to meet with activists. But why did Svetlichnaya “not notice” this for years? And why was it necessary to abolish the department instead of making it work? According to sources Skeleton.Infothis could have been done to “cover the ends in the water”…

Against the backdrop of the general decline in the country, in 2014-2019, the problems of individual regions did not stand out, unless they were accompanied by some high-profile scandals that attracted the attention of the media and the public. Again, these scandals were all that was needed. Is the only problem in the Rivne region, for example, the illegal extraction of amber, and in Odessa and Zakarpattia there are no problems other than smuggling? And the governors appointed by Poroshenko were not even “overseers”, but only “observers”, and very short-sighted ones at that: when they had to answer for something, they threw up their hands – like, we have nothing to do with it, these are all low-level officials, but we will punish them! But the governors succeeded in window dressing, especially when it came to “European integration” or the opening of “new facilities”. Yulia Svetlichnaya also shone in this.

Here is another illustrative example: during her governorship, only one school was opened in the Kharkiv region (a small rural one), and it was not built from scratch, but simply renovated an old one, where classes had not been held since the second Maidan. Of course, the opening was turned into a pompous celebration, regional education officials sang the praises of the head of the regional state administration, many media outlets wrote about this. But what you will not find in the official press releases of the Kharkiv Regional State Administration is the statistics of schools closed in the region. And in 2019 alone, and only in the Pervomaisky district, two schools were closed at once, sending children to others – which have long required major repairsOf course, Svetlichnaya “didn’t notice” the closure of schools and kept her distance from this scandal – let the lower-ranking officials be responsible for it!

By the way, the previously mentioned “friend of the governor’s family” Vitaly Miroshnik, who became the head of the Volchansky district thanks to Svetlichnaya’s patronage, acts in exactly the same way. When in one of the villages they decided to put up a tin bus stop so that the old ladies waiting for the minibus wouldn’t get wet in the rain, and a garbage bin – and at the expense of the village budget – Miroshnik rushed to the grand opening of the “infrastructure facilities” to cut the ribbons to the applause of the schoolchildren who had been driven in. But when he, as the head of the district, was asked to pave the road in the village, and also to give the order to the district municipal service to collect the garbage from this bin, he threw up his hands – there is no money, solve the problems on your own, attract investors!

According to many Kharkiv residents, Svetlichnaya created a kind of her own personality cult in the region, forcing local officials and local media to mention her in all positive news as a caring owner of the region, a benefactor and an inspirer – almost without calling her a “leader and teacher”! But Svetlichnaya’s self-promotion went far beyond the region. With the help of Rainin, who worked as the head of the Presidential Administration and had direct contacts with the West, Svetlichnaya met US Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, made numerous trips to “symposiums” in Europe and the US, and opened an EBRD representative office in Kharkiv (purely “just so there would be something”).

Even earlier, in September 2015, Governor Rainin and his deputy Svetlichnaya, as well as their friend and patron Arsen Avakov, opened an office of the “Kharkiv Region” in Washington, which was a rented room at 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Suite 301. Moreover, Svetlichnaya was called the main executor of this venture, and it was she who gave a ceremonial speech, declaring that through this office, entrepreneurs of the Kharkiv region would enter the US market, and then Europe and Asia. But in reality, this office turned out to be either a ghost or a fake.

A year after its alleged work, independent Kharkiv journalists tried to find out about the successes of the region’s representative office in America and turned to the Department of Economics and International Relations of the Kharkiv Regional State Administration for information. However, they only said that thanks to this office, a certain honey producer (grandfather Panas from Svystunivka?) entered the US market, after which, for some reason, they did not want to talk about this topic further. Attempts to obtain at least some information from the International Agency for Regional Development “GloBee” (whose director Dmitry Shuval was Svetlichnaya’s advisor) were also in vain, although Svetlichnaya herself said: “To establish contact with the office in Washington, you can contact the GloBee representative office in Kharkiv.” Finally, attempts by Washington journalists, at the request of their Kharkiv colleagues, to talk to the employees of this office were also unsuccessful – the office was constantly closed, and its only employee and director, Shai Franklin (although there are six employees on the staff) communicated only via e-mail. And so the question arises: how much money from the Kharkiv region budget was spent on opening and maintaining this ghost office, as well as on “business” trips to the USA by Rainin and Svetlichnaya?

However, despite all these efforts, the real state of affairs in the Kharkiv region was rapidly deteriorating. In just one and a half years of Yulia Svetlichnaya’s governorship, the region has slipped into the ranks of the worst in all key indicators (see the table from the Ministry of Economic Development).

The image of Rainin’s protégé needed urgent correction, and PR people from the Cabinet of Ministers were brought in to help, and they concocted new ones colorful diagramsthrowing out all the negative points and leaving only those in which the region supposedly led: labor market efficiency, accessibility of education and rational use of natural resources. But Kharkiv residents saw the price of these fake ratings with their own eyes – looking at schools closing, forests being cut down and the mass exodus of unemployed people abroad.

Meanwhile, scandals continued to flare up around Svetlichnaya, which she tried to hush up. One of them, a very serious one, flared up around Bohdan Fedak, whom Svetlichnaya lobbied for the post of head of the Kharkiv regional health department. This was actively resisted by the Ministry of Health and personally by Ulyana Suprun, since Fedak was an odious person who went beyond the bounds of ordinary corruption.

Until 1997, Fedak worked as the head physician of the Lviv Regional Clinical Hospital and was involved in the high-profile “child sale case” in which many officials and politicians from Western Ukraine (including the Goryn brothers) were involved, which at the time dealt a heavy blow to the image of the People’s Movement. Let us recall that the SBU exposed a criminal scheme by which Ukrainian children were given (sold) for adoption to foreigners for large bribes – and without proper control, with the risk that the children would fall into the hands of perverts or black transplantologists. In addition, sources Skeleton.Info The SBU testified that foreigners were sold not only babies abandoned by their mothers, but also children who were actually stolen – who were registered as dead. At that time, the case was not given full play for political reasons, the Rukh functionaries came to an agreement with Kuchma and got off with resignations, and Fedak had to answer for everyone – he received 2.5 years in prison, but was released under amnesty a few months later. He was engaged in private medical business for eight years, and in 2006 he got a job as the chief physician of the Kharkiv City Clinical Hospital – either with the help of then-governor Avakov, or with the help of then-mayor Dobkin. And in this position, Fedak “outlived” Yushchenko and Yanukovych, and under Poroshenko in 2018 he was promoted – thanks to his supporter Svetlichnaya, who was smart enough to do this not personally, but through her deputies and subordinates (in particular, the head of the Kharkiv Regional State Administration Office Victoria Belyavtseva). Fedak was supported so much that they even helped him win two lawsuits against the Ministry of Health, which found the ministry’s actions in preventing Fedak’s appointment to be illegal.

It was unclear what interest Yulia Svetlichnaya had in this, but Fedak had been aiming for the chair of the head of the Regional Health Department for a long time. Fedak is a seasoned businessman in medicine, making money on everything (including babies), he developed his own schemes in Kharkov, sold medicine to patients through his pharmacies, sent them for examination to his paid diagnostic rooms, hired incompetent relatives and acquaintances. The position of the head of the Regional Health Department gave him access to hundreds of millions of hryvnias of the regional health care budget and the opportunity to expand his corruption networks to all medical institutions in the region.

Another protégé of Svetlichnaya is the head of the regional oncology center, Denis Skory. He was widely promoted as a brilliant doctor and the creator of a “unique center,” but there were many complaints from patients about Skory and his hospital, and also from relatives of the deceasedprimarily due to extortion of huge sums of money.

Finally, even Svetlichnaya’s feigned “patriotism” was once shattered by her relationship with the scandalous leader of the military-patriotic association “Dynamo” Vitaly Zavgorodniy. No, not as close as with Igor Rainin, but still Zavgorodniy was accepted by Svetlichnaya into the public council under the regional state administration, and it was to him that she entrusted the organization of the regional military competition “Fire Frontier” under the patronage of the regional administration. And suddenly the public reminded loudly Svetlichnaya, that in 2014 Zavgorodniy and his Dynamo players were initially one of Antimaidan organizersand then supported “KhNR”. Svetlichnaya immediately “froze off”, but here’s the question: didn’t she know or forgot about Zavgorodniy’s past? Or did the governor simply need the fists of his “Dynamo” players, as another brigade of “titushki”?

Svitlichnaya’s era in Kharkiv ended with her dismissal on November 6, 2019. Now that she can no longer shut up journalists and public figures, Ukrainians will probably learn many more details from the life of this “new generation politician”. Unless, of course, Yulia Svitlichnaya achieves her new goal – the post of Deputy Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council. After all, although Igor Rainin is unlikely to be able to help her with anything now, their common patron Arsen Avakov, who is interested in placing his people, remains in power.

Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Info

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