Posting about customs on Telegram? Get a search!
Based on the ruling of the infamous Pechersk Court judge, Serhiy Vovk, National Police investigators, along with SBU officers, conducted searches of the apartment of Mikhail Shapirko, who is the administrator and author of the Telegram channel "Gostamozluzhba" and the Facebook page "Pavel Vereshchagin." The channels cover customs, according to Antikor.
According to the NPU investigator Kirichenko, the court's ruling states that Shapirko, using his powers as an employee of the State Customs Service, interferes with the operation of the State Customs Service's systems, obtains restricted information from there, and publishes it on the specified Telegram channel, thereby violating Articles 361 and 362 of the Criminal Code.
That's why it's imperative for the investigator to conduct a search of Shapirko's residence and seize all possible information storage devices he uses—phones, notebooks, flash drives, etc.
The investigator's request was granted on August 9th, and searches and the seizure of storage media were conducted this morning. This is far from a routine event, but this "performance" has nothing to do with exposing any crime.
This story is a pure "order" from those featured in the Vereshchagin publications, an attempt to intimidate the channel's author and eliminate one of the public's sources of information about the real work and problems of customs.
One can spend a long time analyzing the absurdity of the charges and explaining how the information access system works, but an entire criminal case can be destroyed by one fact.
The case was opened on January 20, a month before the war, during whose first days Mikhail Shapirko joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces. So, even theoretically, he could not have been at his workplace at the State Customs Service during the investigation and extracted any information from there.
It's completely unclear what the NPU investigators were investigating under these circumstances from March to August. Actually, no. It's clear. They were fabricating a sham case at the behest of those committing the real crime.
The harsh, critical, yet principled materials of the "Pavel Vereshchagin" channel became a thorn in the side of many representatives of the smuggling world and their patrons in the ranks of the State Customs Service, who found nothing better to do than order a criminal case against its author.
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