(wtf?). Thanks in advance for help.

I can confirm this, there is like ~3 bugs here.

Adding

=encoding utf8
[download]

makes ::HTML die with

Cannot decode string with wide characters at C:/perl/5.12.2/lib/MSWin3
+2-x86-multi-thread/Encode.pm line 176.
[download]

Pod::Simple::XHTML generates

<p><a href="http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?&amp;#x104;">&#x104;</a></p
+>
[download]

Both ::HTML and ::XHTML generate

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
+" />
[download]

regardless of BOM or

=encoding utf8
[download]

which doesn't kill ::XHTML

This is probably related Bug #24820 for Pod-Simple: Pod encoding, unicode issues

You should report bug upstream :)