Mykolaiv Mayor asks journalists to monitor the procurement deals and expose "schemes"

Mykolaiv Mayor Oleksandr Senkevych during a press conference on January 4 asked journalists to carefully analyze purchases made by the City Council's structural units, reports the IMI representative in the Mykolaiv oblast, who was present at the event.

"The media has a responsibility to monitor local self-government bodies. I am in favor of you looking into these tenders and procurement deals, finding all sorts of schemes and agendas there. We will expose all this together with you, check it and hand it over to the police. I have no intention of taking part in such things or supporting those who engage in them," Oleksandr Senkevych said.

He cited a case where working with journalists who had analyzed a purchase deal the previous day enabled them to reduce the cost of the tender.

"I would like to single out the work of journalists. It is very important, and we had an example of this just recently, when a media outlet carried out a procurement deal analysis, provided this information to us, we referred them to the internal financial control department. They worked through the issue that the journalist pointed out and found multiple problems and nuances there. We corrected this deal by the time we settled with the contractor. In view of this, an official inspection into the person who made the purchase was arranged. As I understand that, we will apply disciplinary action to these people based on the results of the investigation," said the Mykolaiv Mayor.

As is apparent from Oleksandr Senkovych's remarks, he was speaking about the purchase of refrigerators for kindergartens and schools, which was carried out by the city's education department the day before. The media outlet "Slidstvo.Info" analyzed the procurement deal and discovered an attempt to overestimate the cost of the equipment by almost two times. After talking with Slidstvo.Info journalists, another agreement was reached, where the cost of the refrigerators amounted only to 22,000 hryvnias. In this way, the Mykolaiv City Council avoided an overpayment of 764,000 hryvnias.