Fake about 12 bottles of wine worth UAH 5 million for Zelenskyy's birthday

A Ukrainian blogger who fled abroad posted an accusation that the state-owned company Garant-Service purchased 12 bottles of wine totaling UAH 5,397,600.

He claimed that the wine was allegedly for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s birthday. As proof, he provided a blurry screenshot of the supposed page from the ProZorro public procurement website. 

The blogger later added that information about this purchase was removed from the site, which is why it cannot be found now. 

The post was shared 515 times, reaching 87,000 people on social media, including Facebook.  

However, the claim is false — the state-owned company Garant-Service made no such exorbitant wine purchase, according to cross-checks of the ProZorro system, other authorized platforms (personal accounts of procurement databases), or in independent analytical systems.

First, it’s nearly impossible to delete procurement information from ProZorro’s system. In fact, the records are instantly and automatically duplicated across analytical systems, which public authorities cannot access. 

When a customer announces a procurement tender or publishes a report in the system (through a personal account on the platform where it’s registered), information about the procurement immediately appears on all authorized platforms and on the prozorro.gov.ua portal. 

There is no trace of such a procurement tender either on the ProZorro site or on authorized platform sites. 

In a recent interview, the Deputy Director General of ProZorro recently confirmed: “No information is removed from the ProZorro website.” Access may be restricted for specific files, for instance confidential files, but their presence remains visible in the system. 

Secondly, analytical systems YouControl and Clarity-Project, which automatically collect ProZorro data, show no such wine purchase. 

In particular, the supplier Veles LLC, as listed on the screen, recently secured a contract with Garant-Service on December 20 for UAH 15,949.50, involving the purchase of 70 bottles of wine. This contract was subsequently published on January 3.

When Behind the News contacted the company, the procurement officer, Tetiana Korolyk claimed no knowledge of any 5 million UAH purchase, stating she had neither signed nor seen evidence of such a tender. She dismissed the information as fake