Assets worth millions and the Iranian trace: Elite real estate in the family of Ternopil prosecutor Vitaliy Panchenko raises questions

Assets worth millions and the Iranian trace: Elite real estate in the family of Ternopil prosecutor Vitaliy Panchenko raises questions

Apartments registered to parents, multimillion-dollar real estate, and father-in-law’s ties to Iranian citizens: AntAC has published a dossier on the new head of the Ternopil Regional Prosecutor’s Office, Vitaliy Panchenko.

We continue introducing the heads of regional prosecutor’s offices appointed without competition by Prosecutor General of Zelenskyy, Ruslan Kravchenko.

Today — Prosecutor of the Ternopil Regional Prosecutor’s Office Vitaliy Panchenko.

“Before the appointment, I had a conversation with the Prosecutor General. Given the situation in the country, the conversation with Ruslan Andriyovych was operational, and my decision was also quick. There are no perfect people, and I am not perfect either. But responsibility, professionalism, and honesty are the criteria I am guided by,” Panchenko told journalists.

We decided to take a closer look at the prosecutor, and here, as usual, his parents own a number of expensive real estate properties that do not match their declared financial status.

In particular, the prosecutor’s mother invested in a nearly 100-square-meter apartment in Kyiv in 2018, and in 2019 she purchased an apartment of almost 90 square meters in Lviv for nearly 1.5 million UAH.

In February 2024, the prosecutor’s mother was gifted a 62-square-meter apartment in Ternopil and a non-residential premises at the same address. The market value of the apartment with renovations is approximately $82,000.

The prosecutor’s father has also been quite successful. While working as an ordinary compressor unit operator at the Lviv Chemical Plant, in 2021 he managed to purchase a 52-square-meter apartment in a new residential complex in Lviv.

Here too there are questions about the source of funds, as the current price per square meter there starts from $1,143.

Prosecutor Panchenko himself, while serving as head of the investigative department at the Main Military Prosecutor’s Office of the OPG, privatized an official apartment in Sofiivska Borshchahivka near Kyiv, measuring 45.7 square meters.

Interestingly, this property has been used free of charge for years by his brother Oleksandr, deputy head of a department at the Prosecutor General’s Office, but Vitaliy does not mention this use in his declarations for some reason.

In 2020, the Ternopil regional prosecutor declared an unfinished 68-square-meter apartment in the same Kyiv suburb, the village of Sofiivska Borshchahivka.

By the way, Panchenko’s wife Olha also has an interesting family.

Our analysts found that Panchenko’s father-in-law, Anatoliy Kostyuchenko, is a former chief physician of a Kyiv hospital and one of the founders of the pharmaceutical company LLC “KANDID.”

The most interesting part is that the other founders of this company are Iranian citizens. Yes, the same country that supplies Russia with kamikaze drones for strikes on Ukrainian cities.

This is why we demand the return of transparent competitions for the positions of heads of regional prosecutor’s offices, so that the practice of manual appointments of “their people” becomes a thing of the past. This, by the way, is also demanded by the EU.