I am asking for help in restoring justice regarding a plot of land, part of which, with the connivance of the city council, is being taken from us by a private entrepreneur.

This concerns a plot of land with an area of 999 square meters on Medvedeva Street, 11, where the fifth generation of our family has lived since 1923 and for which we have always paid land tax. We have all the documents confirming our ownership right to this land since Polish times. But when it came to the privatization of the land, real miracles began.

In July 1997, my wife wrote an application for the free transfer of our land plot into private ownership and paid "Lutskmistobud" for the preparation of technical documentation. According to their measurements, the area of our plot for some reason was not 999 but 1055 square meters. However, in the land plot plan, the total area was indicated as only 931.96 square meters, of which 931 were transferred into private ownership.

No official explanations for such metamorphoses were given to us at the city council, although previously no one had made any claims to this land, and no share of the land had ever been alienated from us. Orally, an ultimatum was set: either you take what we give you, or you will not receive an act on the right of private ownership of the land at all.

We did not agree to give away part of our land to a neighbor — the owner of PE "Denta-Lux," who after that simply bought up 123 square meters of our plot, and we were not issued an act for the land at all, and our issue was not even submitted for consideration at a session of the city council.

The following year, an official from the city architecture department came to my home and began demanding that I remove the fence with massive masonry pillars: supposedly, it spoils the appearance of the street. Instead, he guaranteed to install a metal one at the city's expense. When I refused, the fence was knocked down by municipal workers, and a new one, as was to be expected, was never installed.

As it later turned out, the fence had to be demolished in order to move the water supply column from the boundary of our plot 8.5 meters deeper into our garden. And after that, to announce that about 50 square meters of our land is a plot of "common use" with the "Denta-Lux" firm, whose owner arbitrarily installed a separate sewage well next to the water supply line.

As of today, by order of the city sanitary station, this column has been removed, but both wells remain, and the "Denta-Lux" firm uses them. And that means the threat of viral and infectious diseases continues to remain, as already occurred in 1999, when among our closest neighbors 6 people, including four children, fell ill with hepatitis.

The metamorphoses did not end there. On November 22, 2002, the Lutsk City Council, without our knowledge, adopted a decision approving the project for the division of the adjoining territory of the cadastral quarter. In this decision, our land for some reason is divided between houses No. 7 and No. 9 on Medvedeva Street. In the annex to the decision, 200 square meters of our land are inexplicably depicted on the plan as the adjoining territory of house No. 9, and not a word is said about on what basis it was taken from us.

In 2003, we were forced to write a second application for the transfer of our land plot into private ownership and to pay again to the "Technical Cadastre Bureau" for the preparation of documentation. And again the plan of our plot was prepared in two versions. According to one, the land area is 1007 square meters; according to the other — 850...

We, of course, again did not agree to the second version. However, six months later we learned that the city council had nevertheless adopted a decision to transfer 850 square meters of land to us as ownership. And the 200 meters that we had used for 82 years, paying for it, now "legally" passed to "Denta-Lux."

Numerous appeals to representatives of the executive authorities yielded no result. I understand: the whole reason is that this land is in the very center of the city. But can mockery of the laws really remain unpunished?

Hryhorii LEVCHUK