85% of grain exports are controlled by one official, and grain is exported by fictitious companies – media
8 May 2024 17:33
About 85% of grain exports in 2023 were carried out through Odesa region under special conditions set by the head of the local DIA, Oleg Kiper. Much of this export is carried out by companies with signs of fictitiousness. This is stated in an investigation by hromadske, according to "Komersant Ukrainian"
In 2023, Ukrainian grain exporters exported at least 50 million tonnes of various agricultural products worth $12 billion. Among these products were 16 million tonnes of wheat, of which 13.7 million tonnes were exported through ports and roads in Odesa region. The situation with other grains is similar, the newspaper says.
The situation in the region is controlled by the head of the UMA, Oleh Kiper. on 18 August 2023, together with the then commander of the Odesa Operational and Strategic Group of Forces, General Eduard Moskalov, they issued joint order No. 19 “On some issues of financial discipline under martial law”. It was this order that changed the rules for exporting 85% of the country’s grain.
In short, the order forced exporters to submit a periodic declaration 10 days before the planned grain export. There is no such term in the legislation. Thus, Kiper and Moskalev established special customs rules in the region that do not exist in the rest of the country.
Several grain traders’ associations tried to protest, but the order was never cancelled because Kiper “tolerated it”. Instead, he claimed that he had significantly reduced black exports in his region.
“The day after the order was introduced, when certain processes had already begun and certain mechanisms that we had introduced were being worked out, there were a lot of complaints. All grain associations started complaining about us for some reason. We endured it. If there used to be a huge hole [for black exports at the border], now there is only a small neck,”
– kiper said at the time.
The journalists found that 400 new companies entered the export market after Order 19. About 40 of them have signs of fictitiousness.
“All of them were registered or changed their owners in 2023 and appeared on the market after the issuance of the order. These companies are not part of well-known agricultural holdings, do not have their own land, and have never exported before. We tried to contact the heads of these companies on a selective basis, but the phone numbers were either not answered or out of range. The largest of these companies, which exported $40 million worth of grain, according to the YouControl system, has the same phone number as 139 other legal entities,”
– the investigation says.
In total, in 2023, these companies exported 800,000 tonnes of grain worth more than $150 million through Odesa region.
In parallel with this process, Kiper’s wife Iryna’s business was successfully developing: out of 13 properties worth up to a million dollars, she registered half of them during the full-scale war.
