AMPU and the Ministry of Infrastructure do not want to eliminate the corruption "feeding trough".
We've already written about the deftly organized and executed scam known as the ISPS (the so-called "Port Community Information System"; details are in the publication "Ports of Ukraine: Who Will Finally Stop the Scam?") in Ukrainian ports. Significantly, following these publications, there was no response from the relevant ministry, the Ports Administration itself, or law enforcement agencies.
Meanwhile, forced participants and payers of this scam continue to provide additional information about the origins, implementation, and prospects of this fraudulent project in our ports.
It turns out that specialists at the state-owned Odessa Port began working on the much-needed "information cloud" project for ports back in 2010-2011. Back then, the program, the ISPS, was practically ready, partially tested, and fully ready for deployment. But... In 2013, at the initiative of the previous government, a port reform was implemented. And the young reformers, the state's champions of the port reform, couldn't pass up the opportunity to provide for themselves for life for free. Thus, the scam began to materialize. To this end, most of the Odessa Port's programmers (the author has their names), the program itself, its descriptions, and so on, were quickly transferred to a private entity quickly created for this latest "issue," called PPL-3335. The entire senior management of the Port Administration took up the project (and they are still working in various positions to this day):
1. Endless meetings and conferences were organized at the state enterprise's expense (and continue to be organized), and reports are compiled on topics such as "The Importance of Information in Port Life...," "How Port Clients Should Value the Investment Made by the Private Firm PPL-3335 in Port Operations...," and so on. All senior officials at AMPU and the Odessa Port, without exception, spoke to the freight forwarding community about this endlessly, at every level. On and off the microphone, on the record and off the record...
2. With a light hand and far-reaching plans to subvert concepts, government officials begin referring to the private firm PPL-3335 in official documents as a "Data Processing Center," which subsequently allows them to cleverly avoid even mentioning that the port's top officials are behind this entire information fraud, with only one small private firm "capacitated" by the monetary flows for "information services." Essentially, a course has been set toward privatizing the port's information space, and subsequently, all information flows from Ukraine's external activities in the maritime industry.
3. The heads of the Port Administration at all levels quickly begin to develop and approve illegal temporary and permanent technological schemes for work at checkpoints (the only legal ones must be approved by the Ministry of Justice).
4. They are also developing and implementing a cunning scheme to force port clients to pay for the very software that operates government services at checkpoints. In the last year alone, the scammers have effectively defrauded port clients of nearly 20 million hryvnias... In other words, the "return of some kind of 'investment'" from the private firm to the executors of the "scheme" has begun and is actively underway.
But, unexpectedly for the port "reformers," activists and the media joined the fight for port customers' rights. After a thorough review of the materials, a criminal case was finally opened in September 2014 for this port scam. Case number 12014160790000064 was filed with the Odessa Railways Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Railway investigators, understandably, are unable to unravel the intricacies of the port's swindling "reformers," the case dies, and the railway administration is shut down altogether. Activists are unabated, and in May of this year, a new case was filed with the Investigative Department of the Odessa Regional Prosecutor's Office under number 1215160790000022. In August 2015, another complaint was sent to the regional prosecutor, detailing new and existing reasons for the need for law enforcement intervention in the standoff between the port administration and its clients.
What do freight forwarders and the activists representing them disagree with? Their demands include both legal clarity regarding the program's implementation and use, and purely moral ones. These include the following:
1. The heads of the Port Administration are simply asked to stop lying. To lie about how the private company PPL-3335 made some incredibly large investment in the port industry and now the fee for the program itself must be charged for the life of all port clients... Perhaps the investment was made in the computers themselves, the servers used by government officials at the ports? Again, no... All the computers at the customs office, which are used to run this program, have inventory numbers from the Odessa Port, and they are maintained by the port's system administrators, meaning there's no hint of a "private investment in the industry" from a private company here... Moreover, these port computers are not connected at all to the computers installed nearby by the government for customs. But customs workers are forced to periodically transfer all their data on flash drives from one computer to another... In other words, From a private computer, information about all the actions of foreign trade participants is transferred to a state computer... This is simply a treasure trove of information for any economic intelligence when assessing the economic potential of our country, the foreign economic activity of its entities and their counterparties!
2. Well, government employees—customs officers, border guards, and others—have no right to work on other people's computers, even if those computers are the property of a state-owned enterprise, i.e., the port. They also have no right to work with programs that don't belong to customs. Moreover, this is expressly prohibited for customs officers by Articles 31 and 33 of the Customs Code. But they do work... Because the highest-ranking officials of the Port Administration have forced them to do so with their cunning schemes, integrating a puppet company with some "enormous investments" supposedly for the benefit of the state. Serving customs and other government agencies at ports in favor of a private information company is already taking on a completely cynical and corrupt tone.
3. The "super-investor" program itself is rife with corruption traps, seemingly intentionally inserted solely to preserve and protect the corruption, schemes, and methods that have been devastating container cargo flows in Ukraine for years. Listing these "time bombs" in this article is pointless, as they are so professionally concealed that only specialists can understand them. However, it is especially perplexing why the current leaders of the Ports Authority and the Ministry of Infrastructure are unwilling to familiarize themselves with the list of corruption-related blunders committed in this ill-fated program.
Activists have been proposing this for years, and dozens of times at the highest levels of the Ministry's leadership. Apparently fearing that the full fraudulent nature of this Port Authority brainchild would be exposed during the investigation, no such proposals have been forthcoming from the leadership of this state-owned enterprise. The Ministry is also silent. Fortunately, all those involved in this scam have been promoted and now have the opportunity to oversee the "public-private partnership" process from higher positions, benefiting the private company and the officials who orchestrated this predatory "partnership."
On the one hand, the state spends enormous amounts of taxpayer funds on electronic document management. Year after year, plans are underway to transition to fully electronic standards for information exchange between government agencies and civil servants. But it turns out that this important government work will also rely on the database of the private company PPL-3335 (a limited liability company) of the Port Authority, as government officials work on servers managed by this private company. After all, these servers contain strictly government information on virtually all foreign trade activities of port clients, including which forms of control apply to which cargoes and to which clients participating in foreign trade in Ukraine...
Meanwhile, port volumes are declining, and freight forwarders are leaving the business, unable to compete for their money against their well-paid state opponents in the port mafia. The ability to construct beautiful diagrams and produce convincing reports seems to be the only skill that port officials and their patrons in the industry ministry have fully mastered. Meanwhile, the container business at the ports has hit rock bottom.
Ukraine's former pride—the automobile complex at the port of Ilyichevsk—is already idle. Toyota and Chinese auto suppliers abandoned it entirely just this year. This is another port failure, which we'll discuss later. Meanwhile, we wait and see how much longer these enthusiastic freight forwarders can fight the deeply layered defense of the Port Authority to protect their own information scam in Ukraine's state-owned ports. A scam that is harmful to the state, but which the highest-ranking officials in Ukraine's entire transport sector have literally stood up to defend.
Alexander Zakharov, coordinator of the movement “NO corruption in transport”; Argument
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