Mykolaiv Alumina Plant refuses to disclose CEO’s salary to MykVisti

The Mykolaiv Alumina Plant, previously confiscated into state ownership, refused to provide MykVisti journalist Yulia Boychenko with information about the salary of the company’s director, Boychenko reported in a comment to the Institute of Mass Information.

In January, Yulia Boychenko submitted a query to the State Property Fund of Ukraine, which owns 100% of the company’s assets, asking for information about the 2025 salary of the plant’s director, Oleksiy Medvid, broken down into the official salary, the allowances, the bonuses, the material assistance, other additional payments (specified) for each month separately.

The State Property Fund forwarded the query to the Mykolaiv Alumina Plant, which holds the requested information. However, the team received no response to the request within the time period established by the Law “On Access to Public Information”.

The news outlet received a reply as late as March, signed by the plant’s director Oleksiy Medvid, saying that the company had not received the copy of MykVisty’s request from the State Property Fund and thus “do not understand the details of the requested information.”

However, it added that “the requested information can be obtained from the public section of the Unified State Register of Declarations of Persons Authorized to Perform State or Local Self-Government Functions, which is open and publicly available.” This essentially disproves that the company did not understand what information was being requested.

The news outlet told IMI that they did not rule out suing to obtain answers to the query.

The Institute of Mass Information’s lawyer Volodymyr Zelenchuk said that in this case, both the missed response deadline and the groundless refusal to provide answers would warrant litigation.

“Article 22 of the Law ‘On Access to Public Information’ does not say a query may be declined due to a lack of understanding of the details of the requested information. The sender of the reply seems to understand there details, since they suggested contacting the Register of Declarations, which, according to Part 2 of Article 22 of the Law ‘On Access to Public Information’, consitutes an unlawful refusal to provide information,” the IMI lawyer said.

Last year, MykVisti won a lawsuit over access to infromation against another state-owned company, the Mykolaiv TPP, which tried to withhold data on their top managers’ salaries and supervisory board from the journalists.