The “grain corridor” may disappear due to massive corruption in the State Food and Consumer Service

Over the past month, the police and the State Bureau of Investigation have carried out a number of high-profile arrests of officials of the State Food and Consumer Service of Ukraine (SPSS) and their “accomplices.”

Law enforcement agencies have revealed massive forgery of phytosanitary certificates for agricultural products exported by Ukraine to the world market.

It was established that state inspectors of the State Border Service in the Transcarpathian, Zaporozhye, Odessa and Nikolaev regions, together with employees of phytosanitary laboratories, without taking product samples and relevant examinations, issued, for a monetary reward, documents confirming the quality (safety) of grain, and entered false information into the systems PHIS. In the Transcarpathian region alone, a criminal group issued more than 4,000 false documents indicating the absence of harmful substances and organisms in grain products that were exported to EU countries. And this corruption scheme operates in all territorial bodies of the State Food and Consumer Service.

As a consequence - a warning (notification) from partner countries about the closure of the grain sales market for Ukraine.

This situation arose due to the return by the head of the State Consumer Service, Sergei Tkachuk, to senior positions of officials who were the main characters of corruption scandals in the past. Thus, the team of the former chief phytosanitary inspector of Ukraine Andrei Chelombitko returned with the multimillion-dollar corruption schemes of Loif-Potokin.