“Green corridor” for 6 billion: who is behind large-scale thefts in grain exports through the Odessa port

Conversations around the grain deal have begun again. But in Ukraine, the investigation into non-payment of millions in taxes to the state by the companies TOLANS LLC, LIVION LLC, INTEGR LIGHT LLC, MENTI LLC, which exported grain through the Odessa port, is still ongoing.

In addition, twice sanctioned Russian businessman Alexey Fedorichev is the owner of TIS-Zerno LLC and TIS-Minudobreniya LLC, earning tens of millions from Ukrainian grain. StopCor analysts tried to figure out what kind of companies these were, how they work in the Ukrainian grain market, and why did customs turn a blind eye to manipulations in the Odessa port?

During the UN summit, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky that he had already begun work on renewing the “grain agreement” and was considering a new mechanism, the media wrote about this in early July. This is a very important issue for our state, because entrepreneurs will be able to sell the harvested grain, and the state will receive into the treasury a tax that is so necessary during a state of war. But I would like the state to again not be left with almost nothing, like last time. We remember how Ukraine, after the preliminary “grain agreement,” was stormed for more than a year - Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Slovakia refused to import our grains, there were protests from farmers, the closure of checkpoints at the borders, a rash of grain from wagons, the death of Ukrainian drivers in checkpoint queues .

From May 1, 2023, Turkey introduced a 130% duty on the import of wheat and barley, including from Ukraine. That is, Ukrainian grain was collected with sweat and blood, by the way, blood not even in a figurative sense, because farmers under rocket fire saved their harvest in burning fields, lay spilled on the roads and stood in wagons for weeks.

Today we will not talk about problems with other states and their reluctance to import cheap grain from Ukraine. The problem exists within our country itself, because there were dealers who exported the Ukrainian harvest by circumventing tax refunds.

Odessa ports and problems of sending grain crops

On October 25, one of the largest agricultural associations in Ukraine reported that participants in the grain market were massively reporting groundless delays of ships loaded with export products. For two days their movement by sea almost stopped. And although already on October 26 the Ministry of Development of Communities, Territories and Infrastructure denied this information, the first ships left the ports of Odessa only on October 27.

Such a shutdown of sea traffic during war is not unusual, although this time the reason was not only security issues. This was explained by Oleg Khomenko, director of the Ukrainian Agricultural Business Club: “Of the explanations discussed at the meeting of the coordination council of the Ministry of Agrarian Policy, the first is the military situation, which was very difficult. We saw active patrolling of the Black Sea region by the aggressor.”

But the second factor, according to him, was more careful control on the part of the authorities regarding the issue of non-return of foreign currency earnings by unscrupulous exporters. The suspension of the sea corridor due to the military threat coincided with active measures by the Cabinet of Ministers, the NBU and law enforcement agencies aimed at combating scheme exports.

Already at the beginning of 2023, scandals involving large-scale transactions at customs erupted throughout Ukraine. Then the Security Service and the Bureau of Economic Security (BEB) exposed a dozen officials of the VHI and Odessa customs who were involved in schemes to steal funds from the export of Ukrainian grain. As BEB informed then, in August-September 2022, fictitious companies exported more than 1 million tons of grain of dubious origin due to the capacity of grain terminals in the ports of Odessa, which at that time had just started operating within the “grain corridor”.

About a month later, in February 2023, the Security Service of Ukraine and the State Bureau of Investigation announced the start of a large-scale special operation. Law enforcement officers carried out searches and inspections throughout the customs vertical.

Later, the BEB officially announced that “current and former officials of the Odessa customs were exposed for abuse of power, which allowed the company exporting sunflower crops to evade paying taxes.” The damage caused to the state amounts to more than UAH 13 million. Then five participants in the scheme were informed of suspicion.

The Center for Public Investigation reported on its website that, according to detectives, participants involved more than 370 commercial structures with signs of fictitiousness to implement the scheme. Because of them, wheat was bought from private farmers, agricultural enterprises and large agricultural holdings. After this, the products were transferred through a number of “layout” companies and the grain was sold to exporters for sale abroad. In August-September 2022, more than 1 million tons of grain of dubious origin were exported in this way due to the capacity of grain terminals in the Black Sea, Yuzhny and Odessa ports.

Which companies are under investigation?

Fellow journalists from “The Last Bastion” investigated that forty suspicious companies (probably fictitious) exported grain worth six billion hryvnia through the ports of Odessa. But all the grain was purchased for cash, and therefore billions of hryvnia remain outside the taxation limits. Also, in order to understand what was happening with grain in the Odessa ports, the Last Bastion journalists had to process a huge amount of information in the American customs database ImportGenius. It is in this database that you can see information about all export-import operations in Ukraine since 2011.

Journalists went through all the records manually to find those companies that entered the market after August 20, 2023. 400 new companies entered the market. Some of them are part of well-known agricultural holdings, some are real agricultural enterprises with their own hectares and combines, some have had a successful export history in previous years.

However, in this large flow of information, the Last Bastion found companies that had signs of fictitiousness: those that first entered the market in 2023 do not have production facilities and are owned by someone unknown. And there were about forty such enterprises. All of them were registered or changed owners in 2023. These companies are not part of well-known agricultural holdings, do not have their own land and have never exported before. It was not possible to contact the managers of these companies, since no one answered the indicated phone numbers or were completely out of the zone.

The company “TELMENS” (the old name “MENTI”), the founder of which, as it turned out, is a resident of Uzbekistan, Alexander Raikov, exported grain worth 20 million dollars from Ukraine.

StopCor analysts asked which other Ukrainian companies “distinguished themselves” by not paying taxes to the state treasury. And in the unified register of court decisions they found a definition that revealed a lot of interesting things. Here, along with the already familiar company “TELMENS”, there are a number of companies in which the main division of detectives of the Bureau of Economic Security of Ukraine, with the procedural guidance of prosecutors of the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, carries out pre-trial investigations in criminal proceedings, included in the Unified Register of Pre-trial Investigations No. 72006000. .2023 , on the grounds of a criminal offense under Part 3 of Art. 212 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. If anyone doesn’t know, this article talks about evasion of taxes, fees (mandatory payments), or if they led to the actual non-receipt of funds in particularly large amounts to the budgets or state trust funds. They are punishable by a fine of fifteen thousand to twenty-five thousand tax-free minimum incomes of citizens with deprivation of the right to hold certain positions or engage in certain activities for up to three years with confiscation of property.

So, let's get acquainted. Another enterprise is SANPRO LLC, whose director today is Savka Vladimir Nikolaevich

The owner of the company, Ozgur Demir, is registered in the United States of America. Digging deeper, we see that the current director was only an accountant here a little earlier. The platform C larity-project shows us this.

And even earlier he was an employee of the Galician customs of the State Customs Service of Ukraine

According to the official register of Opendatabot, the company worked and traded in such a way that for two years in a row its profit was in the red. Then, in fact, where to pay taxes from?

And the YouControl register in current communications shows that the official telephone number of the company is registered by three more companies.

Next on the list of our inspections was TOLANS LLC. Its owner Avakova Izabella Anastasovna is registered in Uzbekistan.

The official number of this enterprise also has more than one owner, and also works for three more companies.

But the owner of “TOLANS” probably feels good in Ukraine, because she is a signatory in 79 companies, and a leader in three. The company until 2023 was called “OKTYABRSKAYA TEVEDOORING COMPANY”

The same situation applies to LIVION LLC, the proud owner of this enterprise is Nukhmetov Farukh Sultankhanovich, registered in Kazakhstan. The society generally made a lot of profit in 2021, and in 2022 they earned as much as 100 UAH. net profit. So where do the taxes that the BEB so persistently seeks come from? By the way, the company was previously called “Furka”

In Ukraine, Farukh Sultankhanovich is the founder of forty companies. And what they do is wholesale trade in solid, liquid, gaseous fuels and similar products; cement production; wholesale trade in grain, raw tobacco, seeds and animal feed; construction of residential and non-residential buildings; consulting on business and management issues. As in that old proverb: “And the reaper, and the shoemaker, and the buckwheat.” That is, a general worker.

And perhaps the last company that we will look at is “OLSANA” LLC, and the old name is “INTEGRA LIGHT”. Its owner is also from Kazakhstan and also does not know how to earn money. Because he managed to bargain for 2022, like his predecessor, 100 hryvnia. This is even good, because in 2021 the company generally operated in the red.

Today, the owner of the company is Stasilovich Alexander Viktorovich, and in the recent past - Timchenko Sergey Viktorovich.

Why were we so interested in the previous leader? And all because, according to the Unified State Register of Declarations, the wife of Sergei Viktorovich Timchenko, Yulia Anatolyevna, was the head of the legal department of the Zmievsky district state administration of the Kharkov region (from 2015 to 2022) and the detective officer, GUNP in the Lugansk region (for 2016 - 20). ).

This is the result and there is a large field of activity for law enforcement and other regulatory authorities.

As the Investigation once reported, the State Customs Service of Ukraine failed to properly check more than 600 potentially suspicious grain exporting companies about which the tax service informed it, the report says. These companies had “risks of tax evasion, non-return of foreign currency earnings and legalization of proceeds from crime.”

You can be under sanctions twice in Ukraine and earn money right away

Back in December 2022, when the activities of several hundred “laying” companies were being investigated, Ukrainian law enforcement officers conducted a series of searches in the port city of Odessa and the surrounding region and seized hundreds of thousands of tons of grain from several terminals. These terminals belong to the Transinvestservice company, co-owned by businessman of Russian origin Alexey Fedorichev.

What do we know about him? For several years he owned Dynamo Moscow and was on the list of the richest people in Russia according to the Russian Forbes magazine in 2006. Fedorichev was sanctioned twice in Ukraine. In 2020, President Zelensky removed Fedorichev from the sanctions list, but in 2022 he was sanctioned again.

However, in 2023, Alexey Fedorichev filed a lawsuit demanding that sanctions be lifted from him, canceling the decree of President Vladimir Zelensky.

Journalist Sergei Ivanov reported this on Facebook.

In Ukraine, Alexey Fedorichev is the owner of TIS-Zerno LLC and TIS-Minudobreniya LLC, but is already registered in Hungary.

As we see, a businessman lives even well on Ukrainian bread. Officially, in 2022, TIS-Zerno LLC alone received a net profit of 148,370,000 hryvnia, and in 2023 – 55,474,000 hryvnia. It should be quite good under sanctions in Ukraine.

StopCor analysts will continue to monitor how the investigation with the previously mentioned companies ends. In addition, requests were sent to the BEB and the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine to clarify the situation that has developed in the grain agreements market and to the companies themselves, which are involved in the criminal case of TOLANS LLC, LIVION LLC, INTEGRA LIGHT LLC, LLC “MENTI.” And a request about the activities of Alexey Fedorichev’s companies in Ukraine was sent to the National Security and Defense Council.

By the way, the Office of the Prosecutor General informed StopCor that, based on the results of the pre-trial investigation, the case on the grounds of a criminal offense of tax evasion by the companies TOLANS LLC, LIVION LLC, INTEGR LIGHT LLC, MENTI LLC was closed. In particular, on May 2, 2024, detectives from the Bureau of Economic Security of Ukraine decided to close criminal proceedings under No. 72023000110000044 dated June 6, 2023, due to the lack of a criminal offense.

And surprisingly, no one was interested in the fact that all these companies, selling grain from Ukraine in large quantities, do not register official profits at all.