The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has exposed criminals who stole more than 150 million UAH from Ukrainian companies under the temporary occupation of russia.
Source. SBU.
It is noted that officials of the State Tax Service were involved in the criminal actions.
According to the SBU, the criminal scheme consisted in VAT fraud: "In particular, the criminals appropriated the 'tax limit' belonging to Ukrainian companies that were under the temporary occupation of the ruscists. This gave them the right to pay less than their own VAT and earn tens of millions of hryvnias on this."
"It has been established that the head of the Department for the Prevention and Detection of Corruption of the Main Department of the State Tax Service in Dnipro Oblast and two of his subordinate colleagues were involved in the illegal activity," the SBU said.
In addition, to implement the scheme, its participants unauthorisedly interfered with tax databases and forged digital signatures of management companies. This allowed the criminals to register fictitious business transactions with affiliated commercial entities in the electronic taxpayer accounts of temporarily non-operating enterprises.
"The transactions were carried out without the knowledge of the heads of enterprises from the uncontrolled territories and were aimed at stealing their assets by unjustifiably transferring VAT liabilities to them," the statement said.
The three officials and two of their accomplices, including the "accountant" who kept the "black" books of the criminals, were served a notice of suspicion under two articles of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.
Investigative actions are ongoing to identify and bring to justice all perpetrators.