Deputy Prosecutor General Verbytskyi lives in half million dollar house bought six times cheaper - media. PHOTO
The Deputy Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Dmytro Verbytskyi, lives in a house in the elite Konik cottage community in Kyiv, which his nephew purchased under a power of attorney from an Odesa businessman for over UAH 2 million - a 6-fold discount on market prices.
This is stated in an investigation by Schemes journalists, Censor.NET reports with reference to Radio Liberty.
The two-storey townhouse with an area of 155 square meters is located in the elite cottage community Konik in Kyiv.
As Schemes found out, Verbytskyi lives in a house that his nephew bought under a power of attorney from an Odesa businessman for more than UAH 2 million, which is 6 times lower than the market price. In the ads, the price of a similar house is about 470 thousand dollars (over 18.5 million hryvnias).
The owner of the townhouse is businessman Viktor Pavilch from Odesa region, where Verbytskyi previously worked as a deputy regional prosecutor. According to journalists, on 26 October 2023, Pavilch issued a power of attorney to Verbytskyi's nephew Yevhen, and the very next day, on 27 October, Yevhen Verbytskyi registered the ownership of the townhouse, along with the land, in Pavilch's name.
Dmytro Verbytskyi himself was present at the signing of the agreement, as evidenced by the surveillance footage from the cottage community's surveillance cameras for that day, obtained from Schemes' sources with access to these videos.
When asked about the lowered price of the townhouse, Verbytskyi stated that he knew "only the value that was specified in the contract". When asked whether he considered the purchase of the property by his nephew under a power of attorney six times cheaper than the market value to be a possible tax evasion, he replied: "The said house has a number of defects and requires additional financial investments". Subsequently, according to the Deputy Prosecutor General, he decided to settle there because it was "close to work" and it was a "fenced safe area".
Viktor Pavilch, the owner of the townhouse in Konik, commented to journalists on the understated value of the house and said that he had bought it at the price offered and considered it "quite normal".
At the same time, he added that his son Maksym Pavilch took care of the purchase of the property. Maksym Pavilch's long-term business partner is Odesa-based businessman Dmytro Dimarskyi. He was a suspect in the so-called 'Galanternyk case' regarding the illegal seizure of land plots in Odesa in 2016-2019.
Interestingly, earlier the SBI opened criminal proceedings against the developer of the Konik cottage community, in which the Prosecutor General's Office, with Verbytskyi as deputy head, is in charge of the proceedings. However, there is no active action in this case, and the arrests on the developer's property have been lifted, Skhemy found out. Regarding the criminal case, the Deputy Prosecutor General noted that supervision of SBI investigations "is not within his powers".
