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and other cases connected with the business have since been resolved in favour of the company. “They claimed we hadn’t paid taxes but we proved otherwise,” he says, without identifying the owner of the business. Examination of court records shows that investigation of the case indeed stopped in 2014.
Friends in high places
Besides the vehicle import business, Chabanyuk is also currently director of a local construction company, Osobnyak- K, which is building two apartment blocks in Vinnytsia.
Osobnyak-K mysteriously shares a public telephone number with the Vinnytsia Boxing Federation (VBF), which not only organises the sport locally, but runs its own sports arena and ‘fight club’.
Head of the VBF is a deputy of the Vin- nytsia municipal council, Oleh Aleksa. In an interview, Aleksa acknowledges that he knows Chabanyuk. “I know him, he is a lawyer ... who has provided legal
post service. Since September 2016 he is acting CEO of Odesa Maritime Trade Port, one of Ukraine’s largest.
In April 2015, then head of Vinnytsia tax and customs service Miroslav Prodan chose Aleksa’s deputy at the VBF, Serhiy Kapusta to represent the local business community at a one-to-one meeting publicised with a photo opp.
In February 2017, Prodan was appointed acting head of Ukraine’s national tax and customs service.
Boxing ring
But primarily Aleksa is connected to an influential Vinnytsia businessman and former MP, Volodymyr Prodivus. Prodi- vus, twice boxing champion of Ukraine, is head of Ukraine’s national Federation of Boxing – and thus the main sponsor of the VBF. Prodivus also owns Ukraine’s main bridge-building company, Mostobud.
Chabanyuk’s vehicle importer VVK has a direct connection to Prodivus’s local business structures. According to court
of the company, they said in a petition to a court to raid the premises.
This is the address of a former bus station, where a company owned by Prodivus is based. Stetsenka 75a is also the address of a Ukrainian customs
post – where imported goods can clear customs after entering the country. The territory of the customs post is owned by a customs broker – a private agent who facilitates the customs clearance of imports, according to data provided by the state fiscal service. The customs bro- ker is a certain Serhii Knazhyuk – who
is CEO of one of Prodivus’ local firms. Prodivus, who left parliament after the
October 2014, told bne IntelliNews: "I
do not know Chabanyuk, and regarding the address Stetsenka 75-a, any number of companies could be registered there without having any connection to me."
In 2016, video footage showed Prodi- vus commanding an irregular unit
of armed men, who fired a live salvo over the head of unarmed villagers in West Ukraine’s Rivne region. The clash arose from a dispute over rights to informal mining of amber. Prodi- vus later claimed he had only been trying to enforce the law.
This report was realised with the support of n-vestigate, an investigative journalism project run by N-Ost and funded by the Robert Bosch Stiftung and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Develop- ment and Cooperation.
“Video footage showed Prodivus commanding an irregular unit of armed men”
and consulting services to the VBF,” Aleksa says, adding that Chabanyuk had helped make changes to the federation’s statute. “I don’t know anything about his offshores,” Aleksa adds.
Chabanyuk’s colleague at Osobnyak-K, lawyer Maksim Pavlyuk, signed himself as representative of VBF in a text sent to journalists, underlining Osobnyak-K’s ties to the organisation.
Aleksa is a low-profile local business- man, but with good connections thanks to Vinnytsia’s role in the new post- revolution national elite. For instance,
a co-founder of the Podolsk Union of Entrepreneurs, a regional business lobby, is fellow municipal deputy Igor Tkachuk. Having started business as operator of marshrutki, in 2014 Tkachuk became acting CEO of Ukraine’s national
documents relating to the criminal investigation of VVK, tax police identi- fied the real headquarters of VVK to be at Stetsenka Street 75a in Vinnytsia. Here they expected to find the ‘black accounts’
Find more Eastern Europe content at www.bne.eu/eastern-europe Selected headlines from past month:
· Fifa struggling to find backers for Russia World Cup.
· Why no Euromaidan in Belarus?
· Stagnation as strategy evident in Tillerson’s trip to Moscow
www.bne.eu