Every year, 800 thousand individuals and legal entities register about 1 million state-owned and municipal land plots in Ukraine. At the same time, the laws were developed in such a way that it is almost impossible to register a land plot without violations, and the procedure is corrupt, cumbersome, non-transparent and long-lasting. In spite of the fact that the land reform process has lasted for 28 years in the country and the number of legislative gaps has slightly decreased, the land registration procedure has become much more complicated. The number of regulatory tools in this area has increased, and they are duplicating each other.
For example, you will need to contact up to 14 times with various central and local authorities, land surveyors, appraisers, notaries, ASC and others to register your land plot. Moreover, government agencies compete with each other to control the process of land development and allocation, and the government created 8 different databases to store the relevant information. All this means excessive time expenditure and provokes corruption while being a significant barrier to business.
The government, business, public and expert community representatives discussed the problems in this area during the Roundtable “Land development and allocation for new construction projects: problems and solutions” on December 11. The event was organized by the BRDO Office with the support of EU4Business/FORBIZ as part of the Public Dialogue #PRODialogue.
“There is a kind of “endless circle” in the land sector: the excessive number of rules leads to their violation, and bribes are used to avoid liability for violations. The land registration can take from 8.5 months to 3 years under the current procedure. And the damage to the state due to corruption crimes, which have been investigated in the land relations sector since 2015, exceeds 450 million UAH,” the head of BRDO Construction Sector Olena Shuliak said.
Indeed, the procedure is completely non-transparent, despite the existence of a public cadastral map and services to view information of the State Register of Property Rights to Real Estate. In fact, these electronic systems only partly reflect the land registration procedure and almost do not reflect its history of changes. The output data on state-owned and municipal lands, their functional purpose and registration status is non-transparent. As a result, investors do not understand how to find a land plot for ownership or use.
According to expert estimates, 3 million land plots developed (or 14% of their total number) are not included in the State Land Cadastre. At the same time, unscrupulous purchasers of land plots have the opportunity to cover up unlawful actions with land by sharing or integrating land plots or through multiple transfers between different individuals and legal entities. If this information was publicly available, such situations would not be possible. And all participants agreed on that.
BRDO experts conducted a systematic study of the market related to the land development and allocation for new construction projects and concluded that the following steps are needed to reduce corrupt practices in land relations:
* Reducing the number of regulatory tools from 21 to 14.
* Transforming procedures in electronic services to the fullest.
* Reducing the term for registration of building land plots to 4 months.
The event was attended by the chief of the StateGeoCadastre’s General Directorate in Kyiv Emiliya Yarotska, the head of the board of the PO “Center for Geospatial Data of Ukraine” Andriy Tarnapolskiy, the director of the Land Resources Department of the Kyiv City State Administration Petro Olenych, the director of Inger Grad Ltd. Ihor Raikov, the legal advisor to the International Development Law Organization (IDLO) Yevhen Berdnikov and the managing partner of Totum Law Firm Bohdan Yaskiv.
More information – at www.brdo.com.ua and https://regulation.gov.ua/dialogue