People's Deputy of Ukraine Yevgeny Petrunyak, previously accused of trying to return the “cigar schemes”, due to which Ukraine lost 4 billion UAH annually, is again trying to redistribute the tax burden in favor of cheap cigarettes.
The state will lose from this, and the shadow market for cigarettes will grow even more.
The publication recalls that even in the first months of the new parliament, MP Yevgeny Petrunyak found himself in a group of deputies accused of possibly taking a bribe of $30,000 each. Individual members of the tax committee could receive this “fee” to “bury” bill No. 2047-d, which was supposed to eliminate corruption and intermediary schemes in the real estate valuation market. Individual people's deputies, in particular, as it turned out, the future traitors Dubinsky and Kovalev, as well as Petrunyak, were even forced to take a lie detector.
Another high-profile scandal was bill No. 8174, authored by E. Petrunyak, thanks to which the cigarillo scheme could return, which, as the media wrote, had previously been actively used by the Lviv (Vinnikov) tobacco factory.
The scheme involved sticking cheap excise stamps for 2 cigars on packs of 20 cigarettes. Thus, the factory could annually save more than 4 billion UAH on paying fiscal payments to the state budget of Ukraine.
Although this scheme was legally abolished back in 2021, at the end of 2022, already during a full-scale war, MP Yevgeny Petrunyak tried to return the use of the “cigarillo scheme” with the mentioned bill No. 8174.
Other tobacco initiatives of MP Petrunyak include amendment No. 289 to bill No. 4358 (an effort to return smoking to restaurants and other public places), lobbying for the use of hookahs, an attempt to introduce a separate excise category of goods - “tobacco waste”, reducing the excise tax on them (which is also could be used in excise tax saving schemes).
Given this activity, anti-tobacco organizations awarded Petrunyak the Silver Braid Award for lobbying the interests of tobacco companies for several years in a row (in 2020-2022).
Recently, at a meeting of the tax committee of parliament, Petrunyak again tried to lobby for the redistribution of the excise burden from expensive cigarettes and TVENs (which are more expensive than most cigarettes) in favor of cheaper cigarettes.
Such a redistribution of the excise burden could further strengthen tobacco smugglers and clandestine cigarette manufacturers. Indeed, in the TVEN market the share of smuggling or counterfeiting is close to 0%, and in the market of regular cigarettes it is more than 25%.
As a Kantar-Ukraine study showed, in recent years the Lviv Tobacco Factory has been the largest supplier of cigarettes labeled Duty Free, which could be distributed both in the customs territory of Ukraine and abroad.
Let us remind you that the former head of the Transcarpathian regional state administration Gennady Moskal, back in 2015, openly called the Lviv Tobacco Factory the main supplier of cigarettes from Ukraine to the European Union.
And last year, the Bureau of Economic Security conducted searches at a Lviv factory, during which 1.6 million packs of illegal cigarettes without excise stamps were discovered.
