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panies abroad as first station, and then they move the money to your offshore companies or to the real producers of the goods,” he says.
All this creates a powerful standardised channel for illicit capital outflows, which is also used to move black money – rev- enues from corruption and organised crime – out of the country. “All platforms
While Timonkin fled Ukraine after the 2014 Euromaidan revolution, Marush- evska was catapulted to power by the revolution – only to find the ploshchad- ka system still going strong under new protectors.
Marushevska’s attempts to reform the Odesa customs and stamp out corrup- tion led to an open conflict with head of
According to Marushevska, attempts
to set up an information exchange
with China to access real producer prices proved futile. The situation nearly prompted her to halt all imports from China and Turkey. But since importers are free to choose where they clear cus- toms, customs revenues would simply have been diverted to other regions,
she explains.
Chasing Chabanyuk
bne IntelliNews' investigation of one ploshchadka shows how the network of such schemes can reach right to the top of Ukrainian politics.
The investigation obtained a cache of documents relating to one ploshchadka, around 1GB of invoices, contracts
and payment documents centred on
the activities of four firms registered
in the Seychelles. All four firms were established in the months immediately following the Euromaidan revolution
– and from October 2014 to around April 2015, an estimated $50mn passed through their accounts.
Amid talk of billions, that may not sound like a lot. But given a threefold devalua- tion of the national currency during that period and the imposition of tight capi- tal controls, it was indeed a significant sum. The scale of the activity prompted an investigation by Ukraine’s SBU,
the security service which specialises
“It is a full service – you don’t have to worry about how the money gets there – they do it all themselves using fake companies and fake contracts”
have two main lines – one is supporting illegal import, the second is the illegal export of capital,” he adds.
Customs fraud leads to further forms
of tax evasion in Ukraine. “By reducing the declared value of goods, you reduce customs payments, but then you also reduce all the corporate tax payments by understating the profit you receive from realisation of the goods. Officially you sell the $50,000 cargo for $60,000, but in reality you are selling the $350,000 cargo for $430,000,” explains Timonkin. Handling these sums off the books requires extensive use of ‘fictitious’ or ‘one-day’ firms domestically, adding to the shenanigans.
As to who runs the ploshchadki, of which he estimates there are 7-8 dif- ferent operations at work in Ukraine at any one time, Timonkin denies it is the preserve of organised crime. “It is bank- ers, businessmen and law enforcement officials who organise it,” he says.
Strange customs
Whereas from a banker’s viewpoint the work of ploshchadki consists in the ille- gal export of funds, from the point of view of ex-head of the Odesa customs authority, 28-year-old Julia Marush- evska, they are monopolistic intermedi- aries that control the massive import of cheap consumer goods from China and Turkey to Ukraine.
Ukraine’s fiscal service Roman Nasirov, and ultimately with President Petro Poroshenko himself. She resigned from the post in November 2016, following the resignation of her main political ally, former Georgian president and governor of Odesa Mikheil Saakashvili, from his post in the same month.
Cargoes from China and Turkey usually use pro-forma invoices with reduced prices or outright faked invoices to declare a risibly low value for the cargoes, Marushevska explains in an interview conducted before her resigna- tion. “It’s almost impossible to find real invoices for Chinese and also Turkish cargoes,” she adds. “Sometimes the Chi- nese suppliers agree with the Ukrainian importers to provide invoices with low- ered prices, often enough the invoices are simply faked by the importers using the paperwork of the Chinese firms.”
Marushevska recalls stopping a con- signment of four containers of Viper motorbikes from Chinese manufactur- ers – with a declared customs invoice
of $70 per bike. “It was easy to establish that the real price of the motorbikes is around $1000 – meaning the politi- cally influential importer would pay only UAH150,000 instead of UAH2mn in customs on the container,” she says, adding that the disparity between declared and real price example
is quite typical.
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