Case description
On May 5, 2022, the High Anti-Corruption Court found Andrii Maksymenko, head of the Mykolaiv Road Service, guilty of receiving USD 90,000 and UAH 300,000 in bribes for the road's compliance with the terms of a contract with a private company to repair the H-11 Dnipro-Mykolaiv highway. He got a 5-year suspended sentence.
Andrii Maksymenko was the head of the Road Service in the Mykolaiv region. In the summer of 2018, the Road Service signed a contract with PE Poltavabudtsentr for the current medium-term repair of the H-11 Dnipro-Mykolaiv highway section.
According to the investigation, in 2019, Maksymenko demanded a bribe from a Poltavabudtsentr official for the Road Service to pay for the actual road repairs, and later repeated this demand again. In August, Maksymenko received the first tranche of a bribe of UAH 300,000, and in September, he received USD 90,000. The official was detained in Odesa while receiving the second part of the bribe.
Interestingly, in the summer of 2019, people protested on the highway between Dnipro and Mykolaiv, demanding that the road be repaired as soon as possible. In autumn 2018, people spent the night on the highway leading from Mykolaiv to Kropyvnytskyi, demanding that the holes in the emergency road be repaired. During his visit, Zelenskyy personally instructed Maksymenko to repair roads in the region, but the latter said there was not enough money for this.
Maksymenko's actions were classified under Article 368, part 3; Article 27, part 4; Article 369, part 2 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. He concluded a plea agreement with the prosecutor, so he got a 5-year suspended sentence with a probationary period of 3 years, was fined UAH 17,000, and banned from holding certain positions for 2 years. The HACC also confiscated UAH 100,000 into the national budget.
