Lobbying of the interests of big business: media about Yuzhanina’s work in the Tax Committee of the Verkhovna Rada

People's Deputy from the European Solidarity faction Nina Yuzhanina has been working in the Verkhovna Rada Committee on tax and customs policy for about 10 years.

Under Petro Poroshenko, she headed it, and is now a member of the legislative division. During all this time, Yuzhanina more than once got into scandals related to lobbying the interests of one or another commercial and industrial business group. Sometimes such businesses had corrupt sources.

The international detective bureau Absolution writes about this, having previously written about Yuzhanina’s close ties with the Avtomagistral private enterprise, one of the main contractors of the Big Construction project. But these are not the main topics that Yuzhanina is lobbying for. Let's take a closer look at them.

In June 2019, the politician received the Golden Braid anti-award from activists for lobbying the interests of the tobacco industry. This was preceded by numerous publications from various public organizations and the media regarding the woman’s connections with monopolists.

The head of the Ukrainian Center for Tobacco Control, Andrei Skipalsky, wrote then: “For some reason, any head of the tax committee immediately became loyal to tobacco corporations. When excise taxes were discussed in 2015, we can already say that the price of the tobacco lobby, Ms. Yuzhanina, was about 1.5 billion hryvnia, since her position was to increase excise taxes by 20%. We and the Cabinet of Ministers fought for 40%. If they had increased it by 20%, we would have received 1.6 billion less.”

Transparency International Ukraine, based on its research, then stated that Yuzhanina, as well as people’s deputies Maxim Kuryachiy, Mikhail Kobtsev, Taras Kozak and committee secretary Sergey Sholomitsky have stable ties with tobacco companies. They promote legislative initiatives and regulations that are beneficial to tobacco companies, actively criticize and neglect bills that do not benefit tobacco corporations. In addition, some of them systematically fought for low excise taxes on tobacco. They were supported by the corrupt head of the State Fiscal Service, Roman Nasirov.

The coalition of public organizations “For a smoke-free Ukraine” picketed a meeting of the committee, which since 2015 has not submitted bills for consideration for more than a year (No. 2430−1), blocking the inclusion of anti-tobacco bill No. 2820 on the Verkhovna Rada’s agenda.

In October 2016, Yuzhanina quarreled with her deputy on the committee, people’s deputy from Samopomich Andrei Zhurzhiy. The reason was that he stated on one of the TV channels that all issues that contradict the “party policy” (BPP) are not considered in the committee. Later, Zhurzhy published a message from Yuzhanina that he received after the broadcast. In it, a parliamentarian from the BPP called him a “rare bastard” and “vile.”

More to come. In 2018, during the presentation of a bill on changes to the tax code, Yuzhanina tried to promote an amendment that provided for an exemption from VAT on imported equipment until the beginning of 2020, so that only those companies that were already ready to buy such equipment, in particular the oligarch’s firms, could take advantage of it Rinat Akhmetova.

In 2017, Yuzhanina initiated the abolition of the amendment to limit subsidies “to one hand” for agricultural holdings. As Bihus.info journalists noted, this helped the agricultural oligarch Yuri Kosyuk to gain almost 1 billion hryvnia from the budget. Each Ukrainian paid the businessman 23 hryvnia.

In 2016, the head of the Radical Party, Oleg Lyashko, said that Yuzhanina was involved in the creation of offshore companies for President Petro Poroshenko. He called it particularly cynicism that the president appointed her to lead the working group, which is designed to fight offshore companies. The leader of the VO “Batkivshchyna” said the same thing as Lyashko. Yulia Tymoshenko, at a meeting of the committee headed by Yuzhanina, accused her of involvement in money laundering through offshore companies. For this reason, it slows down the adoption of anti-offshore laws.

The parliamentarian herself replied that she is not Poroshenko’s business partner. At the same time, in 2014, Yuzhanina was engaged in making money from corn, where the director is a Russian, and the contact information refers to the companies “Premo Exim” of Nina Yuzhanina and Petro Poroshenko.

Such actions by Yuzhanina led to the fact that journalists began to carefully study the property status of the people's deputy. In 2017, Yuzhanina was spotted at a joint event with Nikolai Zlochevsky (Burisma Group), convicted of corruption, with whom they posed for a joint photo in Monte Carlo. Moreover, at an event that was organized by the British research Institute named after Adam Smith, owned by a Russian company. This Institute also paid for a trip to Monaco and a room in a luxury hotel, since the visit was not official - such a “gift” from the organizers is a violation of the law.

In December 2018, journalist Alexander Dubinsky reported that Yuzhanina, with the help of her daughter-in-law, hid from NABU the travel company A LA CARTI TRAVEL LLC, acquired in 2017. The owner of the company was a citizen of Kazakhstan, Gulnaz Boshugulova, the wife of Evgeniy Yuzhanin. The girl immediately replenished the company’s charter in the amount of 12 million hryvnia.

The girl decided not to change her last name after marriage. All because Gulnaz became the owner of an apartment in the very center of Kyiv. As the X-Files journalists established, Yuzhanina’s husband bought two parking spaces in the same house. An investigation by journalists showed that the MP himself lives in an elite house.

Thus, the position of a member of the tax policy committee helps Yuzhanina improve her financial situation and negatively influence the economy of Ukraine. However, law enforcement agencies are not yet interested in Yuzhanina’s activities.