Pharmacy chain 9-1-1 poisons customers with counterfeits and profits from its own employees

Billions on medicines, hundreds of pharmacies across Ukraine, and the reputation of one of the largest pharmaceutical networks. That is how the public image of the 9-1-1 network looks. But behind the bright signs lies a very different story: possible schemes to evade taxes, exploitation of workers, complaints from the Antimonopoly Committee, and violations of storage rules for medicinal products, through which a buyer may receive a drug that could have lost its properties even before it reached the pharmacy shelf. And while Ukrainians trust the network with their health, its owners—the Daniyelyans family—are building a multibillion-dollar business.

In the Dnipropetrovsk region, the 911 network of pharmacies numbers 175 pharmacy outlets, but despite their formal registration under different business entities, in fact they operate as a single centralized structure. Management of the entire network, including product procurement, pricing, distribution of proceeds, and financial control, is carried out from a single center, indicating a lack of autonomy of individual pharmacies. This scheme allows artificial fragmentation of a multi-million business, avoidance of VAT and profit tax, and yearly deprives the state budget of substantial tax revenues.

But tax nonpayment is not the only source of the Daniyelian family’s profit. The main earnings come from registering men of conscription age for work who actually never work in the pharmacies. For each such “employee,” they receive more than 10 thousand U.S. dollars. And the most interesting thing is that such an abnormal growth of male employees did not interest the head of the Southern-Eastern Interregional Directorate of the State Labor Service—Blanka S.V.—and the leadership of the State Tax Service in the Dnipropetrovsk region seems to be in on it as well. Because overlooking tax evasion in such amounts is impossible.

Besides trading jobs for formal employment of conscripts, the 9-1-1 network also profits from its own workers. They are transferred between pharmacies and cities without consent, salaries are cut through invented “coefficients,” and when work slows down they are deprived of legally guaranteed idle-time payments. Workers essentially do not know how much they will receive at month’s end, because the employer changes the rules unilaterally. All of this happens under the cover of internal documents used as instruments of savings on people.

But problems at 9-1-1 are not limited to taxes or labor violations. The network came under the scrutiny of the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine after, from February 2025 of the year, sales of medicines from certain Ukrainian manufacturers sharply declined in its pharmacies without any market reasons. At the same time, buyers had for years been attracted by signs reading “PHARMACY OF WHOLESALE PRICES,” although there was no actual confirmation of such prices. These circumstances formed the basis for the AMCU’s conclusions about possible signs of unfair competition and misleading consumers.

And if tax schemes or AMCU allegations affect the state and competitors, then violations in the storage of medicinal products can directly affect every buyer. In the 9-1-1 chain, there is inadequate control over storage conditions: there is no continuous monitoring of temperature, proper recording of temperature indicators is not kept, reaction mechanisms to deviations are not in place, and the documentation to prove compliance is either formal or absent. This means it is impossible to confirm whether medicines were stored under manufacturer-specified conditions and thus whether they preserved their quality, efficacy, and safety.

The problem is not limited to temperature alone. In the 9-1-1 chain, the quality management system is not properly functioning either: there is no effective internal control, no regular self-inspections, poorly organized receiving, quarantine storage, and dispensing zones, and staff training controls have been reduced to formality. Under such conditions, no buyer can be sure that a purchased medicine has gone through the entire supply path from supplier to pharmacy shelf with mandatory licensing requirements.

As a matter of fact, in connection with the illegal activities of the 9-1-1 network, more than a dozen complaints and information requests have already been filed, but in defiance of the law, no response measures have been taken. Moreover, the Daniye­lyans have already launched a legal attack by filing lawsuits for defamation. Through ad hoc courts in Kharkiv region, cases with identical claims have arisen, contradicting the law, but it seems that for judges who have already received bribes, the letter of the law still does not apply.