Ukraine appealed to the World Bank with a request to continue the project of issuing state acts on land and developing the cadastre system until the end of 2012. It has been reported by Interfax-Ukraine with reference to Serhii Kubakh, director of the World Bank Project “Issue of State Acts for Land Ownership and Development of the Cadastre System.” “If the project ends on July 30, 2012, as it was originally planned, there are risks that the work will not be completed, and the results, achieved over the years (since 2004), will be lost,” said Kubakh. Today the work on creating the cartographic database of state land registry is almost completed. But there appeared a problem with making indexed cadastre maps of oblasts because the boarders between regions have not been determined until now. The Day asked the experts to comment on this situation:
Maksym FEDORCHENKO, head of the Center for Land Reform Policy in Ukraine:
“Land reform in Ukraine has been lasting for 23 years now. Was it only yesterday or today that the managers of this project have found out about the problem with oblasts boarders’ determination? This problem is knows since the times of the Soviet Union: the boarders were marked on maps very roughly. When finally they got down to making the indexed cadastre maps, which can not be made by the principle ‘look at any map and draw somehow,’ there appeared a serious problem because issuing of these documents has legal consequences in case of any mistakes made by the cadastre workers. The indexed maps show the boarders of administrative territorial units, it means that they have to indicate the clear division between objects of property, information about the owners and the territorial competence of the local authority bodies. All those years practically nothing was done to create this system. Another proof of that is the lawsuit between Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts that took place several years ago and concerned the boarders between these two regions, which went through the recreationally attractive land (sea coast).
“Ukraine inherited the Soviet system of land management and the purely technical work (map making, identifying the boarders of towns, raions, and oblasts) to bring this system to the new order often went slow and not efficient enough. There is still no law to regulate the administrative territorial structure of Ukraine. The absence of such law is one of the problems for creating electronic land registry. Another reason is lack of interest among the officials in an accurate and clear system, because then collective responsibility ceases to exist.
“In my opinion, once the land market will begin to operate, not only the problem of oblasts boarders will come out, but also a problem of boarders between seven million land plots.
“In order to avoid this, we must finally adopt the law on administrative territorial structure and, based on it, we will be able to determine the boarders of administrative territorial units (oblasts and raions). Two to three more years will be needed for determining those boarders. I think that the year 2012 will bring a failure in Land Reform. Why? Land Reform requires funding and 2012 is the year of hosting a soccer championship in Ukraine and having parliamentary elections. Thus, it seems that the necessary amount of funds won’t be provided.”
Andrii SENCHENKO, member of Ukraine’s Parliament of the 4th convocation:
“Cadastre is, in principle, the mechanism of management and control of all processes in the sphere of land operating, which promotes not only the state interests, but also, in the first place, the interests of land owners. When the introduction of adequate mechanism for land cadastre is delayed, it means that there is more time needed for various schemes in the sphere of land management. Thus, I think, the delay is primarily due to this fact. A thousand reasons can be named not to do something that can be done in a few months.
“Today Ukraine has practically become an outcast in Europe because of its double standards and double moral. The cooperation with International Monetary Fund has been, in fact, suspended. I think that termination of the cooperation with the World Bank is not that far off. I have two reasons to say that. First, total plundering of the money provided by those institutions – it doesn’t make sense for Europeans to fund corruption. Second, the country is going along the path of strengthening its own dictatorship.”
