Vadim Novinsky
Smart Holding (owned by Vadim Novinsky, a Russian businessman with a Ukrainian passport – ed.) continues to destroy the Amstor supermarket chain and the companies within the Amstor group, according to the founders of the Amstor chain. They add that the courts of the Dnipropetrovsk region are assisting Smart Holding in this effort.
Thus, dozens of bankruptcy cases involving companies within the Amstor Group of Companies are currently pending in the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Commercial Court. Meanwhile, the new founders of these companies (affiliated with Smart Holding – ed.) have filed bankruptcy petitions. Eight Amstor Group companies have already been declared bankrupt. The founders of the Amstor chain claim that all the companies were intentionally bankrupted through an artificial debt increment. Moreover, when filing bankruptcy petitions, the new founders cited the absence of any assets or funds in the companies' accounts. Meanwhile, as of December 2014, the companies' balance sheets contained multi-million dollar assets, the founders claim. Where these funds and assets disappeared to remains unclear, they add.
As a reminder, the composition of the founders of a number of companies in the Amstor group was changed as a result of a corporate conflict between the chain's shareholder, Smart-Holding, and its founders in late 2014. The latter are calling the conflict a "hostile takeover."
To support their claims, the founders cite the results of criminal investigations into the seizure of the businesses. The investigation established that changes to the businesses' title deeds were made using forged documents, with the assistance of employees of the Dnipropetrovsk state registration service. Dnipropetrovsk registrars also re-registered the legal addresses, and the new registration is also in Dnipropetrovsk. A handwriting examination confirmed the forgery of the signatures.
Subsequently, all changes were cancelled by the corresponding decisions of the courts of the Donetsk region (at the place of initial registration of the enterprises – ed.), and also confirmed by the corresponding decisions of the appellate court.
However, the network's founders say these decisions cannot be enforced. Smart Holding is actively preventing this. One of the most common and effective methods of countering this is the creation of artificial legal disputes based on claims by the founders of the seized companies against the executive authorities.
To support their claims, the founders cite the example of the Donetskprodtorg Association, which was also seized in late December 2014. One of the new founders of the Association was MORTANO HOLDINGS LTD (Cyprus), which subsequently, along with other new founders, decided to carry out a series of registration actions regarding the Association. Currently, MORTANO HOLDINGS LTD has filed a lawsuit in the Dnipropetrovsk District Administrative Court against the Registration Service of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast to annul one of the aforementioned registration actions carried out in relation to the Donetskprodtorg Association.
The artificial nature of the dispute is clearly evident in the fact that the new founder of the captured company is challenging the registration action, which was carried out by his own decision.
The founders of the Amstor chain point out that in all illegal actions against the seized companies, the courts of the Dnipropetrovsk region, both commercial and administrative, side with Smart Holding.
According to the founders of Amstor, all these facts point to one thing: the takeover of the Amstor supermarket chain in December 2014 was a planned operation that resulted in the theft of enormous resources and, at a minimum, a loss of approximately 400 million hryvnia in taxes for the country's budget in just the first nine months of this year.
"If the Prosecutor General's Office and the Ministry of Internal Affairs are unable to bring the Amstor case to a close, then perhaps the State Fiscal Service and its new head, Mr. Nasirov, will take on the outright violator of financial laws, Deputy Novinsky, and at the very least force him to compensate for the losses he inflicted on the state by effectively stealing and fraudulently bankrupting a thriving supermarket chain," reads a statement posted on the company's website.
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