Ukrgazdobycha announces tender for drilling waste disposal worth 186 million hryvnias. How law enforcement divides the waste disposal market and why it leads to an environmental catastrophe

TK Media investigation.

On July 23, Ukrgazdobycha JSC, the largest Ukrainian enterprise specializing in gas production,  announced a tender for the disposal of drill cuttings from the five drilling rigs used by the company. The declared value of the tender exceeded 186 million hryvnias. Drill cuttings are a natural waste product of the drilling process, appearing as a kefir-like mass and classified as hazard class IV, and their disposal is a necessary part of the production process.

However, unlike the previous tender, the current one does not provide for processing and disposal of drill cuttings or their conversion into secondary raw materials. The cuttings will be disposed of on the principle of "load and haul away": that is, the contractor will load the waste into trucks and take it "wherever they see fit" and where "they won't complain too much." Thus, according to the open tender documentation, the director of one household waste landfill has already approached the disposal firm with a proposal to place the cuttings at the landfill for solid household waste.

This directly contradicts European standards and even Ukrainian draft laws on waste management, initiated by members of the presidential faction. If drilling waste ends up in household dumps or ordinary fields, it could result in an environmental catastrophe.

Market participants already call the tender conditions "strange" and discriminatory. The technical specification lists a large number of documents that are not necessary but take time to obtain, for example, various ISO certificates. The requirement for companies to hold a license for handling hazardous waste is also surprising, given that drill cuttings, according to the state classifier, belong to the yellow category (hazard class IV) and are not considered hazardous. 

"There is a feeling that the tender requirements were written for specific companies," said one tender participant on condition of anonymity. This is not surprising: TK Media previously reported how law enforcement agencies are "clearing" the market by opening criminal cases against environmental companies. According to experts, the reason for criminal raids is to give an advantage to "prosecutor-linked" companies.

In a previous article we reported on Ukrainian entrepreneurs Igor Vysochin (ECO-FORCE) and Gleb Ryzhov (ECOTEK-OIL), who were the first in Ukraine to offer a proprietary unique technology for processing drill cuttings using "filter basins". Thanks to the introduction of advanced technologies, the company quickly conquered the waste disposal market and obtained contracts from drilling companies, but then received... criminal proceedings, searches, preventive measures and masked raids. The company is confident that it was ordered by unscrupulous competitors who lost orders due to lack of technology and lack of competitiveness. While the co-founder of the company that offered the environmental solution is forced to defend himself in court and employees are summoned for interrogations, the market is returning to the past, and drill cuttings will again be dumped in landfills and buried in forest plantings.

The TK Media editorial team studied documents and expert opinions, spoke with experts, and in this material continued to examine how the case against ECO-FORCE was "fabricated."

How the case against ECO-FORCE was "fabricated"

On June 23, 2020, the Pechersk District Court ordered the State Bureau of Investigation to open a criminal case against Alexander Pidlisny, a prosecutor of the Prosecutor General's Office, over the possible submission of false statements in support of the suspicion against Igor Vysochin, co-founder of ECO-FORCE. Two weeks later, on July 15, an SBI investigator entered the data into the Unified Register of Pre-trial Investigations, complying with the court ruling, and opened the case. Nevertheless, the investigation of the prosecutor's possible abuses was assigned to an investigator who was part of the investigative group led by this same prosecutor in the criminal prosecution of ECO-FORCE, which clearly constitutes a conflict of interest. 

According to the defense, Prosecutor Alexander Pidlisny of the Office of the Prosecutor General based the suspicion on a forensic examination of samples from a drilling site where the company had in fact not carried out any work, and after the forgery was exposed, he retroactively changed the object of the forensic examination with his own decision.

Criminal prosecution of ECO-FORCE has lasted for a year and a half, and the alleged document forgery is not the only dark spot in the prosecution's position. The criminal case itself was opened on the complaint of an unemployed "pawn" (a front person, ed.), and in a year and a half the prosecutor's office has not moved a step closer to completing the investigation. It seems that sending the case to court is not the ultimate goal of law enforcement. On the contrary, they appear interested in prolonging the pre-trial investigation in order to use the powers and levers of investigation to pressure the company, the defense says, namely the possibilities to conduct searches, interrogations, seizures, arrests, impose preventive measures and block the company's business activities. 

During this time the prosecution changed its position three times: first the case was investigated under the article "Misappropriation of property," then the qualification was changed to "Fraud." However, although a fraud suspicion presupposes the existence of a victim, there is no victim in the case, Ukrgazdobycha does not consider itself one, and it officially notified the investigation of this. Despite this, the investigation continues.

 On August 18, prosecutor Pidlisny again changed the suspicion and charged Igor Vysochin with another article: Article 236 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, "Violation of environmental safety rules." Even though Vysochin is not even a subject of this article, not to mention the absent objective side of the crime. According to the state prosecutors, the company's activities led to environmental pollution, although on the same day, August 18, an unscheduled inspection was carried out at the company's landfills by the State Environmental Inspectorate of the Central District, initiated by the enterprise ECO-FORCE itself. The inspection did not find any environmental pollution. The inspectors drew up a corresponding act. Asked who took the samples last time, when the prosecutor was present during the inspection, Environmental Inspectorate employees said that the samples were provided to them by an employee of the State Bureau of Investigation. By law, however, samples must be taken by specialists of the relevant profile. 

These and other inconsistencies and violations in the investigation may lead to the conclusion that the prosecution is not interested in establishing the truth in this case, but on the contrary, is doing everything to "tailor" the materials to the goal of the proceedings and to discredit Ukrainian entrepreneurs. And these suspicions would not be unfounded, since pressure on the company has long been not limited to criminal prosecution.

Black PR and "activists" at searches

Even before the "men in black" appeared at the doors of homes and the enterprise's office, the company faced an information campaign to discredit it online. An website called InfoNews, positioning itself as a media outlet, appeared on the internet and began publishing a series of negative materials about the company. Marina Zhukovina is listed as the owner and editor-in-chief of the resource, and she later personally took part in searches at the company's landfills. The materials on the site were presented as "journalistic investigations," but they do not look like journalistic materials: the publications are evaluative in nature and bear signs of "jeans" (paid content). The commercial nature of the publications is also indicated by an active advertising campaign. Thus, InfoNews publications about ECO-FORCE are promoted on the site for money. Interestingly, other news and materials on the site are not promoted for money.

According to Vysochin's lawyers, prosecutor Pidlisny stated that the activist even advises the investigation in the criminal case. Zhukovina herself, as they say, signed a joint appeal with prosecutor Pidlisny to revoke ECO-FORCE's license. It is also notable that the InfoNews website systematically publishes "operational materials" provided by law enforcement (for example, unretouched photos from searches), activists were allowed to take part in the search at the landfill, and the site itself thanks law enforcement officers for their work.

The site has no advertising, therefore it is a subsidized project with an unclear source of funding.

Igor Vysochin provided the publication with screenshots of correspondence, allegedly with activist Marina Zhukovina, in which she supposedly confirms that the investigations into the entrepreneur are a "project." The editorial team examined the original correspondence from the original device and checked the phone number from which the messages were sent. According to our information, it belongs to Zhukovina.

The commercial nature of the persecution of eco-businessmen is also confirmed by the fact that a few days after the publication of interviews with Igor Vysochin and Gleb Ryzhov on the TK Media website, a letter arrived at the editorial office offering to remove the material for money or face a lawsuit. Consequently, someone was ready to spend money so that the company ECO-FORCE would not be heard.

The goal of the discrediting campaign, taken together, is to make entrepreneurs "toxic" for their clients, colleagues, market participants and government officials, to create an image of "people who have problems," even if these problems are made up. For this purpose, for example, "letters of happiness" are also sent to the Ministry of Ecology, the Kremenchuk City Council and the Environmental Inspection Office. But is everything so clear-cut?

What experts say

The presumption of innocence, a right guaranteed to us by the Constitution, tells us that a person is considered innocent until a court establishes otherwise. No one is obliged to prove their innocence; on the contrary, the collection of evidence of guilt rests with investigators and prosecutors. However, the realities of criminal procedure may differ from the beautiful wording written in the country's main law. Investigators and prosecutors are supposed to deal with criminal proceedings objectively and impartially, but what if they already know what result they want to achieve? Arguing with biased law enforcement officers is like talking to a wall. That is precisely why ECO-FORCE had to take the initiative into its own hands and look for ways to prove its innocence. The entrepreneurs decided that they have nothing to hide, and therefore turned to independent judicial experts with a request to check their own landfill. 

At the end of August the results of the examination were obtained, and the TK Media editorial team managed to review the expert's conclusion. The judicial expert, who holds a certificate and bears criminal responsibility for his assessments, made an unambiguous conclusion: no subsidence of the insulating screens of the concrete structures was found, just as no violations of the integrity of the sealing of the concrete tanks were revealed. This examination completely undermines the foundations of the charges against the entrepreneurs and documents that accusations of "environmental pollution" may be nothing more than an attempt to smear the company in the interests of third parties.

The same conclusion was reached by academicians of the National Academy of Medical Sciences of Ukraine, specialists of the O.M. Marzeiev Institute of Public Health, who studied the experts' conclusion. Having carefully examined the materials, the scientists are confident that the conclusions of the examination conducted by the prosecution have no sufficient basis and in many respects are not correct at all, since the experts did not receive any documents proving ECO-FORCE's involvement in violating environmental safety rules. Having studied the technical data in detail, the academicians conclude that the special sites of ECO-FORCE can safely accommodate waste of hazard classes III and IV. The TK Media journalists also familiarized themselves in writing with the Institute's experts' opinion.

"The fact of pollution of the site during the operation of the special site has not been proven either on the part of ECO-FORCE or on the part of other persons. The amount of [attributed] damages is unfounded," the academicians summarize in the conclusion. 

In August 2020, a number of People's Deputies appealed to Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova, calling on her to pay attention to the signs of commissioned actions by her subordinates in the criminal prosecution of eco-entrepreneurs. The floor now belongs to the Prosecutor General. 

Polina Demidova, specially for TK Media