Denys Komarnytskyi, a former Kyiv City Council member, and his wife, Iryna, owned and quickly sold 52 apartments in the capital’s Comfort Town residential complex between 2016 and 2018.
Slidstvo.Info interviewed current apartment owners, many unaware that their purchases might be linked to large-scale land fraud schemes. An expert told Slidstvo.Info that if law enforcement proves these apartments were payments for illicit services, every buyer should be investigated for potential involvement, even if only formally, according to an investigation by Slidstvo.Info.
This is covered in the material by Slidstvo.Info.
OVER $4 MILLION IN REVENUE
Comfort Town is a sprawling residential complex on the left bank of the capital, featuring its own school, shops, and cafes. The colorful buildings are home to many young families with children — a key focus for the developer, who designed the space with them in mind.
Comfort Town has about 7,000 apartments, some of which once belonged to Denys Komarnytskyi and his wife
Built by KAN Development over a decade, it includes 24 buildings, 10 of which were completed in 2015.
By 2016, Kyiv businessman and former city councilor Denys Komarnytskyi, along with his wife Iryna, had begun acquiring apartments in Comfort Town. Over three years, the couple acquired and quickly sold 52 apartments in Comfort Town. According to calculations by Slidstvo.Info journalists, the Komarnytskyis may have earned over 120 million hryvnias ($4.6 million) from these sales.
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- Comfort Town residential complex
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- Comfort Town residential complex
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- Comfort Town residential complex
“DENYS KOMARNYTSKYI? WHO’S THAT?”
The current owners of these apartments, interviewed by Slidstvo.Info journalists, had no idea they might have been part of a large-scale land fraud scheme that law enforcement now suspects Denys Komarnytskyi of orchestrating. Komarnytskyi, by the way, has fled abroad..
Denys Komarnytskyi, businessman and former member of the Kyiv City Council / Source: Ukrainska Pravda
“Denys Komarnytskyi? Who’s that?” one Comfort Town resident responds to a question from Slidstvo.Info with surprise, adding that he has been renting the apartment for several years. “They (the owners — ed.) bought this apartment from the developer and renovated it specifically for renting out,” he said.
Another Comfort Town resident confirmed to journalists that she purchased her apartment back in 2016. The woman agreed to show the purchase agreement, which indicates that the previous owner was Denys Komarnytskyi. The property owner adds that the purchase was made through Comfort Town’s sales department, meaning the apartment already had ownership rights.
“All our communication was through Comfort Town’s sales department,” she recalls. “We purchased it that way and had no contact with this person (Denys Komarnytskyi -ed.). I think there was a notarized power of attorney involved.”
Another apartment owner in Comfort Town, who spoke with journalists, also claims to have purchased the property through the residential complex’s sales department. “I bought it after the building was already commissioned,” explains the current owner. “The price was market rate, and we did everything officially.”
ASSISTANCE FROM THE DEVELOPER
The surveyed apartment owners simply contacted the residential complex’s sales department, where they were offered apartments that were already owned by Komarnytskyi or his wife at the time. It turns out that people approached the official sales department thinking they were buying property from the developer, when in fact some were buying from Komarnytskyi.
Real estate agent and member of the Ukrainian Association of Real Estate Professionals, Svitlana Roshchina, explains that it all depends on the developer’s policy: “There are developers who do not allow this and are only supposed to sell what is under construction, not what has already been invested in,” says Roshchina. “Every developer has its own terms and policies. I can’t speak for everyone. Some don’t allow it, while others are more lenient.”
KAN Development, the company that developed Comfort Town and whose founder, Igor Nikonov, served as the first deputy head of the Kyiv City State Administration under Vitaliy Klitschko from 2014 to 2015, did not respond to Slidstvo.Info’s questions about Komarnytskyi’s apartments.
“THIS IS NOT BRIBERY. THIS IS BUSINESS”
Meanwhile, journalists discovered that Denys and Iryna Komarnytskyi owned an additional 58 apartments in other residential complexes by the same developer. These were premium-class apartments in the Central Park (48 apartments) and Tetris Hall (10 apartments) complexes, located in central Kyiv. These properties followed a similar pattern — quickly acquired and quickly sold. According to journalists’ calculations, all 110 identified apartments could have generated 440 million hryvnias ($17 million) in revenue for the couple.
The value of the Komarnytskyi couple’s 110 apartments could reach 440 million hryvnia ($17 million)
Journalists analyzed all the Komarnytskyis’ property and noticed that the peak of their apartment buying and selling activity occurred between 2016 and 2018. Neither before nor after this period did the Komarnytskyis deal in real estate on such a scale; they only used property that had been in the family’s possession for a long time.
After uncovering all this, journalists attempted to contact Komarnytskyi himself. However, when they called the phone number he had given journalist Mykhailo Tkach as his current contact, his wife Iryna answered instead. As the owner of 62 apartments in the three aforementioned KAN Development residential complexes, Iryna Komarnytska was questioned by Slidstvo.Info about the discovered properties.
When asked by a journalist whether these apartments were bribes, Mrs. Komarnytska replied, “No, these are not bribes. This is business activity.” However, she refused to explain the business interest behind buying apartments and selling them just days or weeks later.
Iryna Komarnytska, wife of Denys Komarnytskyi / Source: Iryna Komarnytska’s social media page
CURRENT OWNERS MUST BE CHECKED
“If these apartments were indeed used as payment for committing a criminal offense in exchange for services, that’s a separate story,” says Oleksiy Boyko, a lawyer from the Anti-Corruption Action Center NGO. “Each person who bought an apartment should at least be formally checked, as they might have been involved in this scheme. That is, if [law enforcement] proves that, for a certain decision—regardless of what it was—say, land allocation, payment was made with 10 apartments, then this constitutes payment for a crime. If the apartments were still in the possession of the person accused of such a crime, they would be seized as bribes.”
The lawyer noted that if the official investigation proves that the mentioned apartments served as payment for certain illegal services or actions, the amount of the bribe should be determined, and this amount should be recovered for the benefit of the state from the guilty party.
In February 2025, law enforcement announced the launch of a large-scale operation called “Clean City” to eradicate corruption in Kyiv’s land and budget sectors. Among the suspects is Denys Komarnytskyi, a former city council member, businessman, and lawyer. It was later revealed that Komarnytskyi had fled the country, and details of land and real estate fraud in Kyiv, with his possible involvement, were published by journalists from Bihus.Info. They noted that the most significant profits could have come from land plots transferred to developers for housing. The journalists refer to the so-called poniatiyky (“backroom deals”) of 2020, which stated that for providing such services, Komarnytskyi was to receive a third of the apartments or at least a third of the profits from apartment sales.
