Ukraine’s SBU cracks down on those who siphoned millions from Ukraine’s budget to Russian oligarch
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Ukraine’s SBU security service has accused the management of the Zaporizhzhya Plant of Electrical Apparatus for causing large-scale damage to the Ukrainian budget, the agency reported on Telegram on Nov. 17.
The plant was owned by Russian oligarch Konstantin Grigorishin until November 2022.
From 2018-2021, the plant's top management organized a scheme for the hidden withdrawal of budget funds through not paying land tax.
The deal caused the state losses of more than 43 million hryvnias ($1.2 million), which the organizers of the scheme gradually transferred to the accounts of Grigorishin's holding companies in Russia.
To disguise the illegal transactions, they were formalized under the guise of "repayment of (the company’s) financial obligations" to the Russian Grigorishin’s companies.
To carry out the scheme, management deliberately underreported the coefficient used to calculate land tax obligations and falsified financial, economic, and reporting documents by inputting inaccurate information.
After exposing the fraud, even before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the SBU initiated forensic economic examinations, which confirmed the facts of the defendants' illegal activities.
The director and chief accountant of the company were charged under the following articles of the Criminal Code of Ukraine:
- p. 2 of Article 28, part 3 of Article 212 (tax evasion committed by an official of an enterprise on an especially large scale by a prior conspiracy of a group of persons)
- p. 2 Art. 28, Part 1 Art. 366 (forgery committed by prior conspiracy by a group of persons).
Investigative actions are underway to establish all the circumstances of the crime and bring the perpetrators to justice.
In 2022, pursuant to a decision by the National Securities and Stock Market Commission, the company was temporarily nationalized as a strategic industrial facility of Ukraine for the period of martial law.
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