Photo from UNIAN
The cadastre isn't public now, therefore only the state can control the country's land bank.
Kyiv's District Administrative Court by its ruling has allowed the State Service of Ukraine for Geodesy, Cartography and Cadastre not to disclose land data contrary to the law.
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"About 19.5 million of land plots have been registered in the State Land Cadastre, which makes it technically impossible to provide such information in the form requested by the plaintiff," the court ruling said, as reported by the Ukrainian online newspaper Ukrayinska Pravda on December 2, referring to OpenDataBot, a business data registration monitoring service.
The cadastre is not public now, therefore only the state can control the country's land bank.
Such non-transparency leaves a lot of space for abuse, OpenDataBot said. Information on land plots, their purpose and owners should be public, according to the law.
"There are schemes that we could easily reveal using open data related to land," OpenDataBot said.
For example, a draft law on the land market stipulates that one person may own no more than 0.5% of agricultural land in Ukraine (200,000-250,000 hectares). This is required to prevent excessive concentration of land by a limited number of people.
In addition, some land plots belong to the same persons through bogus firms and third parties. In some areas, the purpose of land was illegally changed. In certain areas where there is nothing but the steppe or forest, according to the register, illegal mining is under way.
"All these actions could be analyzed by citizens if the data on the land was open," the founder of OpenDataBot, Oleksiy Ivankin, said.