Senior tax official Olena Khotenko ‘borrowed’ $75,600 from her 12-year-old son – reports

Source: Ukrainska Pravda

Interim Sumy Tax Service head and Rivne City Council member Olena Khotenko faces uncomfortable questions after she was found to have borrowed $75,600 from her then 12-year-old son back in 2018.

Her tax forms  from previous years show she took out the loan when her son was still in 7th grade, which set people thinking where the money came from.

Now when Khotenko’s son has turned 18, he’s officially registered as an “individual entrepreneur”, and his business reportedly earned him $81,000 last year.

In her 2016 tax forms, Khotenko allegedly failed to disclose her husband’s share in a house in Rivne. At the time, she held the position of deputy head of the tax office in the Zaporizhzhia region.

“Khotenko ‘forgot’ to mention a 5,920-square-foot house. Such omissions are often made by officials trying to avoid raising suspicion about the origins of their wealth,” said the report in the Ukrainska Pravda.

Half of the house worth at least $291,600, belonged to Khotenko’s mother, Lyudmila Timofeyenko, a Russian citizen. In 2023, the lady gifted her share to her daugther Olena.

Khotenko declared ownership of the entire house, but reported the size as 5,380 square feet, omitting 540 square feet. Officially, the other half of the property still belongs to her ex-husband, Andriy Khotenko, whom she divorced in 2019.

Remarkably, Khotenko listed the property’s value as only $810, a very loose estimate given the house estate prices in Rivne.

A few months after the Russian invasion in 2022, Khotenko’s mother gifted her two more apartments which appear to have been declared at understated values. One of theri Rivne apartment was valued at just $1,350, while the similar ones go on the market valued at  around $18 thousand.

The second apartment, located in Kyiv, had a declared value of $2,700, though similar properties in Kyiv are worth over $23 thousand

In 2015, Khotenko was subject to lustration over her misstatements but got away with it after challenging her dismissal in court. She even resumed her duties as deputy head of the Zaporizhzhia tax office.

The tax official faced even more scrutiny in 2021 when the National Agency for Corruption Prevention (NACP) flagged her for intentionally providing false information in her asset declarations.