Ukraine’s government rushed on Aug. 2 to extinguish public uproar over reconstruction efforts at Okhmatdyt, the country’s main children’s hospital based in Kyiv, which was heavily damaged early last month by a Russian missile strike.
Health Minister Viktor Liashko announced that a new tender to choose a construction company will be held in the next 7 to 16 days after media reports questioned the qualifications of a developer who won a prior competition.
“There are concerns that this company does not have the necessary equipment to perform the work needed,” Liashko said, referring to Bud-Technologi, which was selected winner of the now-canceled tender.
Liashko spoke at a press conference alongside representatives of Okhmatdyt to address concerns over possible corruption during the previous tender aimed at selecting the construction company to rebuild the hospital after the deadly Russian attack on July 8.
The unusually swift government response came after Nashi Groshi, an investigative publication focused on uncovering corruption, published a story on Aug. 1 that criticized the selection process and the “no-name” winner’s allegedly inflated bid prices, and questioned its ability to perform the task. The report sparked outrage among Ukrainians on social media.
According to the Nashi Groshi report, Bud-Technologi’s winning bid was among the three most expensive offers in the competition, while at least seven other companies submitted fully eligible commercial proposals at much lower prices. The winner's bid also included restorations that had already been done by the previous hospital contractor free of charge since the attack. However, those works could have been done after the damage evaluation, which the companies used to draft the proposals.
At the press conference, Okhmatdyt management said that the offered prices were preliminary and meant to be revised according to the actual amount of work.
The tender includes restoring only one of the Okhmatdyt compound’s buildings damaged in the Russian attack, the biggest and most advanced one which, reportedly, accounts for up to 95% of the hospital’s functions. In total, five buildings of the hospital were damaged in the strike that killed two people and injured 32 more.
Mainly due to the effort of the staff and hundreds of volunteers, many evacuated children were able to return for treatment less than a week after the attack, including patients with cancer. According to Okhmatdyt's CEO, Volodymyr Zhovnir, the hospital currently operates at 60-70% of its capacity before the missile strike.
Liashko said the money raised for reconstruction would be transferred from the account of Okhmatdyt’s charity fund, which was created after the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, to a government-managed Okhmatdyt account.
The money — Hr 378.6 million (over $9.2 million) collected at the Okhmatdyt charity fund’s account since the attack, as the hospital statement from July 31 says — should have been sufficient to cover the winning company’s bid outside the bureaucratic state procedures. It allowed a private competition rather than a government tender to choose the recommended contractor.
However, concern looms that the new process, using government accounts, may restrict and prolong renovation procedures for hospital staff and patients anxious to restore the hospital’s full capabilities before winter sets in.
The other funds raised for the reconstruction of Okhmatdyt include Hr 312 million ($7.5 million) donated to the hospital’s government-controlled account, Hr 320 million ($7.7 million) raised by the state fundraising platform United24, and another Hr 100 million ($2.4 million) coming from the state budget.
Much of this money was raised in a nationwide effort by regular people, shocked by the brutality of the attack on Ukraine’s main children's hospital. According to volunteers, even some front-line soldiers sent donations to Okhmatdyt, despite their chronic need to buy equipment. Many Ukrainian businesses also mobilized to donate millions of hryvnia.
Big foreign donors pledging help include Howard Buffet, the middle son of the billionaire American investor Warren Buffet, and Germany and Lithuania.
As donations poured in after the attack, journalists and activists, mindful of the history of corruption scandals during the 10-year-long construction of the hospital’s newest building, closely watched the restoration updates.
When experts estimated the damages, the hospital invited developers to bid for reconstruction. After a tender that lasted several days, Okhmatdyt announced the winner of the competition on July 31. It said that the competitive selection was not a tender within the norms of Ukrainian public procurement law, but a private competition, chosen over the official government procedure for “open and honest use of funds donated by citizens.”
Yevhen Vember, head of the charity fund, insists that the private competition was nevertheless transparent.
“The tender was held through an open platform on the condition that all the documents and bids will be available for public review,” he said at the press conference.
He stressed that time is of the essence, given that “winter and autumn are fast approaching.”
“So we tried to do everything quickly and fairly,” he added.
Minister Liashko said that a council will be created to oversee the spending from the government accounts in the new procedure. According to Liashko, it will include up to 15 people — representatives of the six biggest donors, the Health Ministry, and the hospital — who will select a few more council members from the patients’ committees, anti-corruption watchdogs, and construction organizations.
Afterward, Liashko added, the tender will be held in the electronic procurement system Prozorro, which has become the go-to platform for conducting public procurement procedures in the country since its launch in 2016.
However, it does not guarantee that it will solve another problem Okhmatdyt faced — the lack of big, reputable companies bidding for its reconstruction.
“I know for sure that we will turn to the largest (construction) developers,” the hospital’s medical director Serhii Chernyshuk told the Kyiv Independent days after the attack in July. “Only a company with big resources and experience can do (the restoration) quickly and properly. There are not many such companies,” he added.
However, none of these companies ended up in the final selection round of the private competition. Out of 17 developer offers, only three bids scored high enough on the experts’ list of evaluation criteria to even be considered for the task. Of those three companies, two were vetoed by Okhmatdyt charity fund’s lawyers who found “signs of dishonesty, or problems that carried additional risks” for the project, Chernyshuk said at the conference.
Moreover, none of the biggest developers in Ukraine even applied for the competition, Chernyshuk told the Kyiv Independent.
“We chose among the companies that entered the open competition with no restrictions,” he said. “We really hoped the big developers would participate, but it didn’t happen.”
Chernyshuk said that despite the project's social importance, the big developers might see it as small and commercially uninteresting. He hoped that the Health Ministry would ask them to participate in the new tender for Okhmatdyt, as it is balancing the sense of urgency, need for quality, and public scrutiny.
“Unfortunately, if we don’t restore this building quickly, we can lose the unique infrastructure that makes Okhmatdyt what it is,” CEO Zhovnir said.
Note from the author:
Hi, this is Natalia Yermak, thank you for reading this article. Over the course of the Russian invasion, the most inspiring thing for me has been telling stories of people coming together to overcome the acts of Russia's brutality like this hospital attack. Even amid darkness, they find light through compassion towards others. If you share these values and want to help us bring them to light, please consider supporting the Kyiv Independent by becoming our member.
Olena Tregub
