Premier Yulia Tymoshenko is calling for illegally allocated forest and land plots to be returned to state ownership.

“We are at the next stage of checking the legality of the treatment of land and forests by the previous government” said Tymoshenko at a press conference on Wednesday.

According to her, several thousands inspections have been made of allocation of land and forests into private ownership or rent.

“We have established 17,000 serious violations of the law where corrupt schemes were present. Information on 1602 cases, where there have been signs of crimes, has been submitted to the Prosecutor General and criminal cases must be filed,” said Tymoshenko.

“924,000 hectares have been illegally allocated. But where are the budget funds?” she said.

According to her, “documents on all these incidents have been submitted to the court.”

“If we can return all 924,000 hectares we will have tens of billions of additional hryvnias for the state budget. Ukraine is a unique country in terms of the large sale theft of land and forest,” said Tymoshenko.