In April 2024, the Ministry of Justice published statistics on the transfer to the state of the property of political parties that were banned under the Ministry's claims. Asset recovery proceedings were initiated against certain collaborators who came from these parties

 Among the defendants are names that have long been notorious in Ukraine. These include Volodymyr Saldo, the former head of the Kherson Regional State Administration who sided with the occupiers; Yevhen Balytskyi, the ‘governor’ of the occupied part of Zaporizhzhia region; Dmytro Tabachnyk, the former Minister of Education of Ukraine who publicly supported Russian aggression, and others.

How fast is the process of asset recovery, how legal is this procedure, and when will it be implemented by the State Property Fund - Taras Ryabchenko, legal analyst at the IZI, tells for Podrobytni.NTN.

 The expert notes that, first of all, the confiscated assets of collaborators are not easy to sell, they can be subject to arrests and other encumbrances. This complicates and slows down the decision-making process on the sale of property. Currently, we know of about 50 decisions to recover the property of collaborators, but the revenue from the sale of these assets to the state budget is still much more modest than it could be.

‘But, on the one hand, these are the difficulties that exist, and on the other hand, we are acting within the framework of the current legislation,’ explains Taras Ryabchenko.

The analyst also emphasises that this is not an arbitrary seizure of property, as the special procedure was adopted in 2022, when the Law of Ukraine ‘On Sanctions’ was amended to apply a sanction in the form of seizure of assets of individuals and legal entities to the state revenue. In the future, the proceeds from the sale of these assets can be used to rebuild Ukraine.