Prosecutors of the Kropyvnytskyi District Prosecutor's Office have sent an indictment to the court regarding an organized group of four officials, who were exposed for embezzling over 3.2 million hryvnias of budget funds.

Among them are the director-co-founder of a company, an economist from another LLC, the head of the Kropyvnytskyi City Council's department, and her subordinate. Materials regarding another figure, who was the director of another private enterprise, have been separated into a separate criminal proceeding. She has been declared wanted.

The investigation established that the leaders of four interconnected contracting organizations developed a scheme through which they profited from supplying thermal energy and providing energy services to kindergartens and schools in Kropyvnytskyi.

They artificially increased the number of days in the heating period, even though the educational institutions were not operating. This way, the volumes of consumed energy and the amount of payments increased, while the city council official signed official documents with forged data.

From October 2019 to June 2024, the accused, by inflating the indicators of the actual savings achieved, illegally received budget funds.

Based on the collected evidence, the members of the organized group are accused of embezzling budget funds in particularly large amounts and official forgery (Part 2, 3 of Article 27, Part 5 of Article 191, Part 2, 3 of Article 27, Part 3 of Article 28, Part 1 of Article 366 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine).

The pre-trial investigation was conducted by the Kropyvnytskyi District Police Department of the Main Directorate of the National Police in the Kirovohrad region with operational support from the regional units of the DSR of the National Police and the Security Service of Ukraine.

Note: according to Article 62 of the Constitution of Ukraine, a person is presumed innocent of committing a crime and cannot be subjected to criminal punishment until their guilt is proven in a lawful manner and established by a guilty verdict of the court.