A plea agreement has been concluded between the SAPO prosecutor and Volodymyr Melnychuk, former head of the Department of Logistics and Fuel Supply at Tsentrenergo PJSC, in the case concerning a gas overpayment exceeding UAH 8.25 million.

According to investigators, the scheme relied on artificially inflating, retroactively, the price of natural gas that had already been delivered and paid for, in order to conceal a private supplier's debt to the state.

In May 2020, Tsentrenergo signed an addendum with United Energy LLC, represented by Andrii Korotkevych-Leshchenko, and fully prepaid UAH 476 million for June gas supplies at a fixed price of UAH 2,800.02 per 1,000 m³. Because the Trypilska, Vuhlehirska, and Zmiivska thermal power plants ultimately consumed less gas than was paid for, the private supplier ended up owing the state enterprise more than UAH 23 million.

To avoid repaying this debt, Korotkevych-Leshchenko drew Tsentrenergo officials into the scheme in July 2020. He drafted a fictitious letter requesting a fuel price increase, deliberately backdating it to late May.

The parties then falsified a second addendum, backdated to June 1, 2020, which retroactively and groundlessly raised the price of part of the June gas supply to UAH 3,092.92 per 1,000 m³ — artificially reducing the private company's debt to the state by UAH 8.25 million.

In late July, the parties finalized the scheme by drawing up three false gas acceptance-transfer certificates at the inflated price, falsely dated June 30, 2020. As a result, by August the supplier had returned only UAH 14.8 million to the state, causing Tsentrenergo direct losses exceeding UAH 8.25 million.

Volodymyr Melnychuk's role was to sign the documents and facilitate the scheme from within Tsentrenergo — without his signature, it could not have worked. Upon receiving the forged May letter from the supplier in July, Melnychuk signed it and set it in motion, despite knowing the date had been falsified. He then knowingly approved the fictitious addendum, aware there were no grounds to revise pricing on an already-completed June contract. In the final stage, he signed, on Tsentrenergo's behalf, three false gas acceptance-transfer certificates for the Trypilska, Vuhlehirska, and Zmiivska plants — drawn up in late July but backdated to June 30, 2020. These signatures allowed United Energy LLC to legally avoid repaying UAH 8.25 million to the state enterprise.

The HACC approved the plea agreement between the SAPO prosecutor and Volodymyr Melnychuk, sentencing him to 3 years' imprisonment. Under Article 75 of the Criminal Code, the court released him from serving the main sentence, with a one-year probation period. The court also fined Melnychuk UAH 8,500 and barred him for one year from holding certain positions in government bodies, state enterprises, and municipal institutions. Under the terms of the agreement, Melnychuk must also transfer UAH 1 million to the Come Back Alive fund within 30 days of the verdict taking legal effect.

This is not the first plea agreement in the case. On December 30, 2025, Andrii Korotkevych-Leshchenko, head of United Energy LLC, also pleaded guilty and fully compensated the UAH 8.25 million in damages caused to Tsentrenergo.

The case against two members of the state enterprise's board — Oleksandr Uvarov and Yaroslav Hromko — remains before the HACC. Uvarov is evading investigators and the court, so his case is being tried in absentia (special judicial proceedings).