ARMA Did Not Sign Auction Result Reports for the Sale of Land in Zakarpattia

On February 8, the Asset Recovery and Management Agency announced that it had reviewed the winners of the auction for the sale of land in Zakarpattia and refused to sign the asset sales reports.

This is stated in ARMA’s official communication.

Following its review, the Agency identified indications of links between the buyers and the asset owners. This runs contrary to international asset recovery standards.

Under the requirements of the ARMA law, the purchase of real estate at auction is formalized on the basis of an act of sale of such property and the electronic auction report generated by the electronic trading system and signed by both the auction winner and the National Agency.

Accordingly, this makes it impossible to register ownership rights in the names of the auction winners.

The Agency also stated that it will improve its approaches to vetting auction participants in order to prevent similar situations in the future.

“The ARMA has the authority to verify the winner after the trading procedure is completed. However, going forward, everything possible should be done to avoid a repeat of situations like the one with the Borzhava land. Therefore, we expect amendments to the procedure for selling seized assets to be introduced as soon as possible, so that international standards prohibiting the sale of assets back to their previous owners are explicitly reflected in it,” said Pavlo Demchuk, Senior Legal Advisor at Transparency International Ukraine.

We previously analyzed the issues in this case in the following article.