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July 27, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 2
Death in Vinnytsia
a Vinnytsia apartment in early October 2017, panic broke out inside: how to conceal hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash paid in bribes. The solution was desperate but nearly worked: a bun- dle of envelopes containing $105,000 dollars flew off the balcony and landed in bushes in the dark- ness below. An accomplice waited below to collect — but then so did the police.
Investigators alleged the money was bribes paid to the head of Vinnytsia’s department of the State Fiscal Service via a relative of one of his subor- dinates. The bribe-givers were a cluster of car importers operating the same scheme: importing tens of millions of dollars worth of microbuses and trucks from shell firms in the UK and else- where.
In reality the vehicles were imported from Ger- many and Poland. The scheme with the shell firms was used to falsify the value of the vehicles declared at the Ukrainian border, and thus reduce customs payments.
Photos from the raid posted by Prosecutor Gen- eral Yury Lutsenko on Facebook showed envelopes containing thousands of dollars of bribes from firms pencilled on them: TOV Nord-Vest and TOV Skrai- rem. Customs records show these together had imported to Ukraine around 200 trucks in 2017 from a Scottish registered shell firm, Rix Europe LP.
The police raid had immediate national signifi- cance — the acting head of Ukraine’s state fiscal service Miroslav Prodan had been head of the Vinnytsia fiscal service department until 2016. The current head alleged to have been taking the bribes, Ruslan Osmolovsky, had been Prodan’s deputy. The two are socially close, turning out for the same five-a-side football team.
Prodan in turn is a favourite of Groysman, mayor of Vinnytsia from 2006-2014, who had backed him for the crucial post.
Investigators closed in on both Prodan and Oslo- mosvsky in July 2018, searching their apartments and questioning and searching their drivers, lead- ing to Osmolovsky being declared a suspect. The Prosecutor General’s office said in a statement that a "a criminal organisation — was formed on the territory of Vinnytsia, which, according to the investigation, included officials of the State Fiscal Service authorities ... In particular, in 2015-2016 the members of this criminal organisation en- sured the appointment of their representatives
to the most important posts in the bodies of the State Fiscal Service of Ukraine,” as quoted by Interfax Ukraine.
Prodan said he had nothing to hide. "We already had cases of clarifying relations in public between the heads of law enforcement agencies ... It did not produce results. Everyone lost. If they have questions for me, I am ready to give them an an- swer," he responded in a post on Facebook.
“Prodan will remain acting head of the tax service as long as I remain prime minister,” Groysman said defiantly earlier in July, as quoted by Interfax Ukraine.
Death of a strawman
In closing down the Vinnytsia operation, Ukraine’s prosecutor general was only following in the foot- steps of bne IntelliNews. As early as April 2017, a bne IntelliNews investigation in collaboration with the Vinnytsia Agency for Investigative Journalism had revealed the Vinnytsia customs fraud scheme and interviewed two of its alleged organisers: Prodan’s sidekick Osmolovsky, and low-profile lo- cal businessman Yury Chabanyuk, now deceased.
“We are one of the largest importers of used vehi- cles, second largest in Ukraine,” Chabanyuk said of the business he claimed to run as director of a local firm, Skif Ukraina, one of the alleged bribe givers. “We are the biggest tax payers in Vinnytsia region in the automotive branch after [President Petro] Poroshenko,” he added, saying the busi- ness had an annual turnover of around $12mn. Chabanyuk denied in the interview there was any-