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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
🚁 “Golden” drones for the Armed Forces of Ukraine: the director of LLC VOLER IMPORT caught inflating prices and falsifying documents worth millions
An attempt to “optimize” documents when importing drones from Poland and to overstate their value for resale ended with the transfer of materials to the prosecutor’s office to open a criminal case. The company director involved in the scheme is Serhii Mykolaiovych Melnyk.
📌 What happened at the border: substitution of prices and quantities
The director of LLC VOLER IMPORT, Serhii Melnyk, declared at customs the importation of 50 sets of DJI Mavic 3T drones with a total value of $305 000 (more than 12,6 million UAH) with exemption from customs duties and VAT under the wartime benefit (code “235”).
However, checks through Polish customs authorities revealed a very different picture. According to the Polish export declaration and invoice, in fact 80 sets of drones were sent from Poland to Ukraine (50 units Mavic 3 Thermal and 30 units Mavic 3 Enterprise) with a total value of $274 352 (more than 11,4 million UAH).
Customs officers found discrepancies in the names, quantities, terms of delivery, and the actual value of the goods, which had been deliberately inflated in the documents for subsequent sale and participation in tenders.
⚖️ Court decision: from an administrative protocol to a criminal case
The Khmelnytskyi City District Court of Khmelnytskyi region reviewed the case materials concerning the company head Serhii Mykolaiovych Melnyk.
Considering that the value of the goods with false information exceeds 11,4 million UAH (which far exceeds the threshold of 5000 non-taxable minimum incomes of citizens), the court saw signs in the director’s actions of an offense provided for by Articles 201-3 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (commodity smuggling on a large scale).
The court ordered that the case materials be sent to the head of the Khmelnytskyi Regional Prosecutor’s Office for a pretrial investigation.
Date of the decision: 14 October 2026.
This was reported by the Telegram channel “Sudom po skhemakh” citing case No. 686/20612/26.
💡 Advice from the Telegram channel “Sudom po skhemakh”
• Cross-check customs data on both sides of the border: Rigorously ensure that Ukrainian customs declarations, invoices, and specifications precisely match the export documents of the foreign sender.
• Benefits do not exempt from liability: Having wartime import benefits for drones does not authorize submitting false information about cargo or manipulating prices.
• Avoid artificially inflating prices for tenders: Schemes that rewrite equipment values for the military through chains of intermediaries inevitably lead to severe legal qualification under articles on smuggling and misappropriation of property.
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