Bogus Ties Will Not Do

The State Tax Administration (STA) has announced it has busted a well-developed network of bogus facilities which launder shadow funds. It was found that the Taki Dila (Such Things) publishing house was involved in legalizing the latter, the STA press service says. The tax administration considers this facility an active lawbreaker and has inspected it not out of political considerations but because it was part of a widespread money laundering network, which used for this purpose bogus firms, commercial strawmen, forged documents, and contracts. Moreover, the STA inspection was pursuant to a Central Electoral Commission request to check the reports that Yuliya Tymoshenko’s bloc was violating election law in producing printed matter.

It was found that a subsidiary had put to its own accounts hundreds of thousands of hryvnias it received from the Product BVO bogus firm which contracted Taki Dila to produce printed matter for the Tymoshenko election bloc and laundered this money by having this order filled. As the key figure in the bogus firm chain which legalized the dirty money, Taki Dila remitted UAH 286,000 to the accounts of the Rembudproekt firm on December 27, 2001, and January 28, 2002, alone.

However, the Holosiyivsky District Court of Kyiv noted in its ruling that Product BVO and Rembudproekt acted using the lost internal passport of one S. S. Chemer, who had nothing to do with and had never managed these enterprises. It was thus in fact proven that these are fake firms.

The STA points out that Taki Dila rendered cut-rate or nominally priced printing services to the Yuliya Tymoshenko Bloc, for the true cost of them should have been at least twenty times higher. There is enough documentary evidence that the Product BVO false firm funded the production of printed matter for Yuliya Tymoshenko’s election campaign, the STA press service claims.