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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
According to Plinsky, monitoring the activities of conversion centers is an integral part of the shadow architecture of the State Tax Service (STS).
The Bureau of Economic Security (BES) on Sunday reported the exposure of a conversion center through which 23,5 billion UAH passed. Journalist Yevhen Plinsky noted that the case was implemented immediately after the Office of the Prosecutor General and the State Tax Service were left without their previous leaders.
He said that after the personnel changes, the State Tax Service lost the prosecutors’ “cover” and came out of the control of the group of former Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko.
He lists a chain of events that, in his view, affected the situation with exposing the conversion center. It all began when on 5 September NABU launched operation “Carthage,” and already on 7 September investigators conducted searches at the Ternopil STS. On 14 September President Volodymyr Zelensky suspended Ruslan Kravchenko from the post of prosecutor general, and Prime Minister Koretsky suspended Lesia Karnaukh from performing the duties of head of the STS. On 17 September Karnaukh finally submitted her resignation from the post of first deputy head of the STS, and already on 21 September the BES was able to move forward with the implementation of the case against the giant conversion center.
“The full control of the STS by Kravchenko is evidenced by the episode of how the main operative of operation ‘Carthage,’ Serhiy Kropyva, had his own quota for appointing deputies to Karnaukh’s team, who turned out to be the ‘deputy for digitalization’ Ihor Panchenko,” the journalist said.
He added that on NABU tapes Kravchenko even congratulated Kropyva on the appointment of “his deputy” in the STS.
“That Lesia Karnaukh came to the STS from the position of Kravchenko’s deputy in the Kyiv Regional State Administration when he went to the Prosecutor General’s Office, I think is already known to everyone. That is, from the moment Kravchenko entered the position of acting head of the STS in 2024 and until the moment of ‘Carthage’ in September 2026, everything that happened in the tax service was controlled by him or people subordinate to him. This is his vertical, which from the height of the prosecutor general’s office also provided the highest level of security. Including for schemes inside the STS,” he writes.
The journalist emphasized that monitoring the activities of conversion centers is an integral part of the shadow architecture of the STS.
“Transactions without goods, roll-ups, the creation of fictitious VAT could never be possible without the participation of tax officials… In the system of money movement there is always a trail that allows tax officials, without leaving their computers, to expose any conversion center,” Plinsky writes.
He added that the absence of high-profile investigations into tax schemes in previous years is explained by the fact that such centers served as main sources of shadow income for high-ranking officials.
“And since we have already established the connection STS — Office of the Prosecutor General, it is quite obvious why during the period 2024 – 2026 we did not see either high-profile investigations of tax officials or of tax schemes… That is why BES detectives could collect information on conversion centers and other sensitive tax topics as much as they wanted, but their final implementation was impossible for a long time,” the journalist writes.
He notes that the current period of a conditional “power vacuum” and personnel reset in the Office of the Prosecutor General and the STS allowed law enforcement to take cases accumulated in safes and start working according to the law.
“Let’s just do it faster and more. New teams with new “principles” and lists of firms and people will come in now, and once again we will wait for a ‘shift change,’” Plinsky concludes.
Recall that on 20 September BES Director Oleksandr Tsyvinsky reported the exposure of a “conversion center” that could have helped evade taxes of about 3 billion UAH. BES together with the Office of the Prosecutor General carried out 50 searches in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa and seized unaccounted cash worth millions of hryvnia. Participants in the scheme have already been notified of suspicions.
In the article “A test for Zelensky. Will he change the rules for appointing the prosecutor general after Kravchenko’s resignation,” the head of the Legal Department of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, Olena Shcherban, explained why the next appointment of the head of the OPG will be a trial for the president.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Журналіст розповів, як справа «Карфаген» та «безвладдя» в ОГП та ДПС сприяли викриттю конвертцентру на 23,5 млрд грн". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: ZN.ua.
