PRESS RELEASE
February 22, 2013

On February 21, 2013, Kyiv hosted the 4th International Conference "Commercial Horticulture 2013", organized by the Ukrainian Agribusiness Club, AgriEvent agency and supported by the Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food of Ukraine, with Vasil Kisil & Partners law firm acting as a general legal partner of the event.

Close to 200 representatives of agricultural companies and holdings, resource companies, mass media, specialized government agencies' officials, as well as financial, educational and research institutions gathered to discuss the prospects of the relevant markets, review new technologies and learn modern global trends of the sector.

VKP's Real Estate and Land Law Practice Counsellor Natalia Dotsenko-Belous gave a presentation on "Land relations in 2013 and their impact on the fruit and vegetable sector." Natalia highlighted the main features of the land reform, which comes into force on June 1st, 2013; in particular, what is new in the process of registering property rights to land parcels and their encumbrances in a single system, which is the State Registration Service. The expert stressed that in order to register a right to a land plot one must submit an application to the State Land Cadastre. In this regard, the applicants or the transferees face several challenges when trying to execute the registration of their rights. At this point, the State Register of Rights does not contain the information on rights to real estate, in particular, the rights of land ownership. But in order to complete the registration, the registrar must verify information regarding these rights to the real estate from the State Register.

«In reality, we have to admit the existence of negative manifestations suggestive of political confrontation between the structures that were earlier responsible for the registration of property rights, and structures that are now in control of this process as a result of the registration reform», – stated Natalia.

Despite the fact that according to the law the state registration is public, State Register of Rights is not a fully public source of information on the rights to the real estate.
At the moment, there is no procedure for the transfer of information on land rights by the bodies of the State Land Cadastre to authorities responsible for the registration of these rights. In particular, we lack a procedure for the transfer of information on land rights from the State Land Cadastre and / or land records to the Register of rights to immovable property.

Given the above conflicts, agricultural producers, including producers of fruits and vegetables, that have not yet had the time to register their titles to land and property acquired prior to January 1, 2013, may have significant difficulties and incur additional costs.