9 million bypass the budget: How companies linked to Pelipas and Titov fended off a lawsuit by the Mykolaiv City Council

The South-Western Commercial Court of Appeal upheld the ruling that denied the Mykolaiv City Council its claim to recover most of the debt sought from Christmas LLC. Nikcenter reported this on October 6, 2026.

The case concerns a 4-hectare plot of land at 2-v 8th Pozdovzhna Street, which the company received for use in 2014. The land was allocated for the reconstruction and subsequent maintenance of non-residential premises for a municipal shopping complex.

And this is where a rather revealing story begins about how 9 million hryvnias can run into trouble not because of a lack of money, but because a piece of paperwork was not amended in time. Under the agreement, the annual fee was set at 3% of the land’s normative monetary valuation. When the agreement was signed, the land was valued at about 7.5 million hryvnias, making the annual fee 225,000 hryvnias, excluding VAT. However, the land’s normative monetary valuation later increased substantially.

The Mykolaiv City Council argued that, starting in 2020, the fee should have been calculated using the new normative monetary valuation—about 81.3 million hryvnias. The city council therefore assessed underpayment by Christmas LLC for the period from January 1, 2020, to March 6, 2024. The total claim amounted to 9,112,974 hryvnias and 27 kopecks. In the council’s view, that was how much the city budget had lost because the old land valuation had been used. But the courts saw the matter somewhat differently.

The court of first instance held that this case concerned a superficies agreement, not a lease. In the court’s view, the parties had to sign a corresponding written supplemental agreement to change the fee established by the contract. In other words, the new normative monetary valuation, by itself, did not provide grounds for automatically recalculating the fee under an existing agreement. Because no such supplemental agreement had been signed, the court denied the city council’s claim to recover most of the amount sought—about 8.8 million hryvnias. On September 29, 2026, the court of appeal upheld that ruling.

However, the case did not end in a complete win for Christmas LLC. During the proceedings, the company acknowledged a debt of about 218,000 hryvnias arising from its failure to pay annual indexation. The company had already paid part of this amount—108,900 hryvnias. The court of first instance ordered the company to pay the remaining 109,100 hryvnias, along with the court fee. So, to put it simply, out of a multimillion-hryvnia dispute, the amount left to be recovered is hundreds of times smaller than what the city council originally sought.

According to YouControl, Christmas LLC was registered in Mykolaiv on August 19, 2009. Its principal business activity is building construction. Nikcenter reports that until September 2026, the company was owned by Tetiana Hlonza and Hanna Titova—the wives of Mykolaiv businessmen Oleksii Pelipas and Mykhailo Titov. However, as of October 2026, according to an analytical system, 100% of Christmas LLC is owned by Ruslan Nikolaiev, and the company’s registered capital is 7.8 million hryvnias.

Nikcenter has also discussed in its investigations the business group of Mykhailo Titov and its links to Mykolaiv’s business community and authorities, and previously reported his arrest in 2017. These circumstances are not at issue in the current land dispute and do not mean that the court found Christmas LLC guilty of anything in this case.

In effect, the Mykolaiv City Council sought to revise the fee for using 4 hectares of municipal land based on the new valuation and to recover more than 9.1 million hryvnias for previous years. But the courts ruled that the agreement itself first had to be properly amended before the fee could be recalculated. The court of appeal upheld the ruling. As a result, the council’s claim to recover the principal amount—about 8.8 million hryvnias—was denied.

The result is a rather peculiar situation: the land remains municipal property, its normative valuation has increased more than 10-fold, and the city has calculated millions in unpaid fees, but the court explained that the agreement’s amendments first had to be properly documented.

Legally, this is called complying with the terms of an agreement. For the city budget, it is another example of how costly a bureaucratic formality can sometimes be.