Back
Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
After Saakashvili’s crackdown the “walnut mafia” moved its operations to Marushevska’s customs office
Shell companies continue to export English walnuts at underreported prices, and their main customs office now is the Odesa one.
This is reported by Yuriy Vynnychuk in Business.Censor.
Under Viktor Yanukovych’s rule walnut exporters paid a bribe to process one truck in the amount of $12-16 thousand. That money went to front companies that exported the nuts on behalf of the real producers.
After the change of power in 2014 several months passed when English walnuts were exported without bribes and front companies. But then exporters ran into problems again: tax officers, the SBU, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs pushed businesses to work through new shell companies that exported the walnuts abroad under their own names. The price of that service was $9-10 thousand per truck (20 tons of shelled walnuts).
These firms sent the goods abroad to foreign companies at the underreported customs price, and those companies then sold them at market value. This scheme allows officially not returning export proceeds to Ukraine, and the intermediaries’ unofficial earnings over six months amounted to $9,1 million (almost 230 million UAH at the average exchange rate of 2016).
Currently 95% of Ukrainian walnuts are exported under this smuggling scheme, with customs values being underreported by a factor of 2-3. From January to July alone shelled walnuts worth 0,17 billion UAH and unshelled walnuts worth one billion UAH were exported from Ukraine.
More than half of the shelled walnut volumes were exported through the Odesa customs office, headed by Yuliya Marushevska, an appointee of Odesa Governor Mikheil Saakashvili. This customs office became the main one for firms that recently entered the walnut business but already became leaders in exporting it at underreported prices.
Recall that Saakashvili repeatedly accused law enforcement and the prosecutor’s office of corrupt schemes in walnut exports; he also personally released entrepreneurs’ seized cargoes.
In May the newly appointed Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman instructed several ministries to develop mechanisms to eliminate walnut smuggling, but afterwards these schemes continued to operate at the customs office. In early July Groysman appointed former head of the State Fiscal Service in Vinnytsia region Myroslav Prodan as acting deputy head of the State Fiscal Service of Ukraine under Roman Nasirov. Prodan was a suspect in criminal cases about corruption during the customs clearance of English walnut exports. After Prodan’s transfer to Kyiv those cases were closed.
Head of Odesa Customs Marushevska, in turn, accused the head of the State Fiscal Service of Ukraine Roman Nasirov of holding a closed competition to appoint heads of Customs posts in the Odesa region.
nashigroshi.org
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Після наступу Саакашвілі «горіхова мафія» перенесла свою діяльність на митницю Марушевської". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: ANTIKOR.
