Odesa customs officers are accused of fraud during grain export
16.01.2023 - 14:50
The Ukrainian parliament began an investigation into the money laundering scheme during the export of grain from the ports of Odesa.
The temporary investigative commission of the Verkhovna Rada interrogated the head of Ukrainian customs and the acting head of its Odesa branch. The commission discovered the fact of fraud and money laundering on the grain market. It was known that numerous shell companies participate in tax evasion schemes and change entries in their books, thus hiding income from the tax service, Kyiv Post reports.
3,000 companies submitted customs declarations, among them were hundreds of suspicious persons. At least half of the suspicious companies “sailed with the grain”, said People’s Deputy Yaroslav Zhelezniak.
In early January, during a surprise raid, the DSBU and the SBU issued 30 search warrants at the Odesa Customs. In particular, searches were also conducted at the customs posts of three main regional seaports.
It will be recalled that at the end of November 2022, a group of Ukrainian deputies announced a fraudulent scheme in the Odesa port related to the grain market and international trade. Among them was the sale of assets to the russians, and a corruption scheme involving bribing traders for access to the grain corridor.
The scheme, which is being investigated by the DSBU, mainly focuses on small-scale grain traders who entered the market after the start of the full-scale russian invasion. Thousands of small farmers began to trade their grain internationally with the help of several hundred brokers who appeared suddenly. Many were shell corporations created overnight.
According to traders, local farmers took advantage of a loophole in the law that allowed them to use the black currency market, where the exchange rate was much more favorable than the rate for official banking transactions.
These cases became part of the money laundering investigation. According to a source in the temporary investigative commission, the co-owner of one of the companies involved in illegal schemes is a russian citizen living in occupied Donetsk.
On the website of the YouControl agency, a warning is attached to the profile of this company: “Counterparties of the subject, which is located in the temporarily occupied territory, are deprived of the opportunity to carry out any operations. <…> This can lead to financial losses and business destabilization, as well as attract the attention of law enforcement agencies.”
Previously, USM wrote that a corruption scheme related to the “grain corridor” was exposed in Odesa. In order to hide the operation of the scheme, the officials of the State Production and Consumer Service identified individual commercial enterprises that, under the guise of consulting and fumigation services to exporters of grain crops, acted as intermediaries in receiving bribes.
