July 27, 2016 by detectives NAB of Ukraine under the procedural guidance of prosecutors The Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office conducted searches in the offices of the Investigative Department of Financial Investigations in the Shevchenkivskyi district of the State Fiscal Service in Kyiv (former tax police).
The searches were conducted as part of a criminal investigation into officials of this agency, during which it was established that they demanded a bribe of $36,000 from an entrepreneur for assistance in making "correct" procedural decisions in a criminal case that was illegally opened against the entrepreneur.
During searches of the office, cash totaling approximately $300,000, over €100,000, over £30,000, and 1,500,000 hryvnias were discovered and seized. And this was from a district tax police official. One can imagine the sums of money that are in the offices of the State Fiscal Service of Kyiv and Ukraine.
The reason for NABU's keen attention to the work of Shevchenko tax officials was the appeals of entrepreneurs and wave of publications in the media, which revealed the "methods of operation" of Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Basyuk, an investigator for especially important cases at the Main Directorate of the State Fiscal Service. The scheme was simple and well-established: illegally initiating criminal cases, mass inspections of businesses, gross interference in foreign trade import-export activities, and the illegal seizure of equipment and documents. As a result, genuinely operating businesses were forced to pay off their debts with bribes.
Previously, before his transfer to the Kyiv State Fiscal Service Main Directorate, while still working for the tax police in Kyiv's Shevchenkivskyi district, Basyuk had been repeatedly implicated in high-profile cases of pressure on entrepreneurs and extortion. But instead of being sent to a pretrial detention center, the zealous tax officer was transferred to the Kyiv State Fiscal Service Main Directorate. Clearly, for certain people, he was a valuable asset, someone who knew how to share.
Sources at the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) claim to have uncovered a scheme by which Kyiv State Fiscal Service officials transfer the lion's share of the money "earned" from entrepreneurs to the leadership of the Kyiv State Fiscal Service and Ukraine.
Thus, the detained investigator and the head of the Investigative Department of the State Fiscal Service of Shevchenkivskyi District are merely cogs in the vast corruption machine of the State Fiscal Service of Ukraine.
For now, the NABU has begun unraveling a well-established extortion scheme from the grassroots. It's highly likely that the next stage will be equally high-profile arrests of officials at the Kyiv State Fiscal Service. Moreover, the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office has already opened criminal proceedings against these individuals under Article 368 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.
SKELET-info
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