The Optima Distance School has announced that it has been forced to suspend the construction of an educational center near Kyiv due to unfounded accusations by law enforcement officials of illegal land acquisition.
Maria Miletska, founder and CEO of the Optima distance school, told Interfax-Ukraine at a press conference on Tuesday that the issue is the investigation by law enforcement agencies that accused her of illegally seizing a 4 hectare plot of land near Kyiv.
According to Miletska, the project has been suspended for at least four months.
For his part, Miletska’s lawyer, Oleksandr Protas, noted that, according to the accusations by law enforcement agencies, Miletska has no legal rights to the land plot, despite the fact that she purchased it on the secondary market at a market price.
Protas clarified that the land plot was alienated from the land fund of the Ministry of Defense six or seven years ago and has changed hands several times since then.
“As it turned out later, this land is under investigation because it became a source of enrichment for some officials. I can’t comment on whether this land was transferred to individuals legally or illegally, but Maria Miletska bought this land absolutely legally, at a market price. A company engaged in professional land search offered the land, all payments were made in non-cash form, and there were no comments from the state registrar or the notary who carried out the registration. And after the land was acquired, Maria Oleksandrivna, unfortunately, became a party to the criminal proceedings,” he said.
At the same time, the lawyer emphasized the “unprecedented pressure (on Miletska – IF-U) from the investigators who are investigating this case”.
“I was present during the searches that took place unexpectedly, I witnessed outright threats against me. There was no need to conduct such investigative actions as a search at all, because the documents that law enforcement officers needed were provided voluntarily,” he said.
Protas noted that “there are already two court decisions where Maria Oleksandrivna is recognized as an absolutely bona fide purchaser of this land.”
“The panel of judges took the side of our client that Maria Miletska did not alienate the land from the Ministry of Defense, that Miletska purchased it from individuals to whom the state had no claims until recently,” he said.
Protas clarified that the local village council distributed the land among its residents back in 2017, and until 2023, they were absolutely the legal owners of the land.
At the same time, Protas noted that his client has no grounds to apply to the ECHR so far, as all the possibilities for protection provided by national law have not been exhausted.
In turn, the founder of the Optima School, Latvian citizen Roberts Vaisla, noted that the school has already implemented several educational projects in Ukraine. These include the Optima Kids project, which provides educational materials and enables children to prepare for school, and a college that provides training in three specialties.
In addition, Optima has received Cambridge accreditation and is preparing content that allows Ukrainian children to study according to Cambridge standards and programs in Ukraine.
