The dark post. What is behind the black band in the life of the company
New mail with enviable persistence pursue problems. Not so long ago, the database of the company’s customers got on the Internet. On March 16, with unexpected searches, the GPU came, and literally the next day, the new mail received powerful DDoS attacks. NV Business understood what is behind this band of failures.
On Friday evening, thirty men in black, unmarked, burst into the offices of the country’s largest private postal operator in five cities (Kiev, Poltava, Kharkov, Odessa, Lviv and the Dnieper). As a result, 42 ticket offices were searched. “I have never seen a chief investigator on especially important matters stand on the toilet and twist on the ceiling some hatches, as it was in our offices,” – co-founder of the New Mail company Vyacheslav Klimov told the atmosphere of the searches yesterday at a press conference.
As a result of the searches, 132 thousand UAH of cash were officially seized in one of the offices of Kharkov. According to the New Mail, it is a legal money transfer in the cash desk of Post Finance (works within the group), which one of the customers did not have time to pick up. “We will appeal this withdrawal, since the money was formally held through the cash offices of our financial company,” Klimov promised.
Klimov points out that the searches were purposefully conducted in the offices of the owners of the New Post, not ordinary managers and not even top managers. One of the co-owners of the New Post, Vladimir Popereushnyuk, claims that the investigators seized about a thousand files of information from his personal laptop, and most of the documents contained commercial information. Investigative actions lasted for eight hours, ended at about one in the morning.
malicious defaulters
The decision on the searches in the New Mail was made by the scandalous Pechersky Court, at a closed meeting on February 28. Pre-trial criminal investigation was started as early as November 18, 2017. For five months of investigation, the GPU has never contacted the leadership of the New Post. There was no communication from the State Fiscal Service either.
The new post has not yet been issued a court decision. As a result, its contents became known from the so-called “white hackers” of the Information Resistance. According to their information, on the day of making the decision on November 18, there were registered about a hundred more productions concerning various firms. It is noteworthy that literally two days later, on November 20, the GPU lost investigative powers. That is, right on the eve of the loss of their powers, the prosecutor’s office nashtampovala decisions from which they can collect the “cash crop” for months ahead, say in the IP.
The suspicion refers to tax evasion, cashing in using fictitious firms and documents. In fact, the GPU accuses the New Post of using FLP to reduce the amount of taxes paid. In the New post itself they say that they pay an official white salary to all their employees. “I prefer to consider this situation in the light of the understanding that this can not happen in principle, and what is the reason for all this is their questions.” There is no real reason, “Pereshnyuk stressed.
In the GPU they say that the proceedings are open on the basis of the criminal offenses provided for in Part 2 of Article 364 (abuse of power or official position), Part 3 of Article 212 (evasion from payment of taxes, fees, other mandatory payments) of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. “According to the materials of the criminal proceedings, officials of a group of related companies used a criminal scheme aimed at providing cash transfer services and minimizing the tax liabilities of client enterprises by forming a fictitious tax credit with the conduct of non-performing transactions,” said the spokeswoman for Prosecutor General Larisa Sargan .
According to her, the chairman of the GPU took the case under personal control and, if the evidence of violation of the law by the company’s officials “will not be received,” criminal proceedings will be closed. Yesterday evening Lutsenko met with Klimov and “acquainted” him with “numerous facts of sending large amounts of alcohol-free products and narcotic substances in large quantities.” According to the results of the meeting, according to Lutsenko, the parties “found a common language” and “developed a joint plan of action.”
I decided to popiaritsya on everything that happened, and Prime Minister Vladimir Groisman, who announced that the first meeting of the commission he created a month ago to verify the implementation of the law “Mask-show stop” will deal specifically with the resonant case of Novaya Pochta.
Market participants, for example, the co-owner of Rozetka.ua Vladislav Chechetkin draws attention to strange “coincidences”: first in Facebook, pro-government bloggers (“porokhoboty”) dispersed the wave of condemnation of the company in that it uses the FLP scheme. Then the next day there are strong DDoS-attacks, which were not previously in the history of the company. The source of the attacks was localized by IT security specialists of New Mail in Ukraine. But they caused, what is the reason, is still unknown.
Meanwhile, not everyone agrees that claims to the New Post appeared on an equal footing. Thus, Ukrposhta CEO Igor Smelyansky, commenting on the accusations of the use of FLP’s New Mail for tax optimization, said: “I think everyone in the market knows everything.” Therefore, it’s impossible to do simple conclusions that one prosecutor’s office is to blame. it’s easy to explain what’s going on, nobody can explain it to anyone, and it’s not interesting to anyone in complicated way. “We therefore do not officially comment,” he said.
Smelyansky stressed that Ukrposhta, unlike Novaya Pochta, has no right to use FOPs in its work. “We have, for example, absolutely all the staff in the state, and they are paid wages.” Earlier, we used civil-law contracts when, conditionally speaking, the cleaner could be taken to the staff to wash the floor, “says Ukrposhta CEO . – And now this is also prohibited. The new post is a private business, they are used to working in a different way. ”
effects
In any case, the conflict with the New Mail is detrimental to the country’s investment image. According to the president of Kyivstar company Petr Chernyshov, thus the authorities showed themselves to those who “talk about improving the investment climate in the morning, and break into big, good companies in the evening and take out computers.” Recall that on January 4, Kyivstar also experienced a similar raid, but only from the DFS.
Surprise, according to the deputy head of the Strategic Group of Advisers to Support Reforms Pavel Kukhta, also causes why it was the GPU that came with searches. Even if the company did not pay taxes in full – and this is stated as the main reason for the search – the business should be dealt with by the DFS. “There is a clear discrepancy between the alleged violation and the investigative actions, and if there was a failure to pay taxes, it was not difficult to bring it through even a desk audit, without going to the place. Very few people, observing this from the outside, can be sure that indeed, a search was necessary, “said Artem Afyan, managing partner of Juscutum.
The chairman of the European Business Association, Tomáš Fiala, confuses the selective nature of justice in the case of Nova Post. He draws attention to the fact that the inspections do not come to the business that is mired in corruption scandals, but is connected with the authorities. “It seems that they only come to a white, transparent business, where everything is easy to see and test, whereas to a business that has stolen hundreds of billions of hryvnias from the state budget – for example, in the banking sector, oil and gas – with representatives of such business only meet on the sidelines “, he says. The number of inspections of enterprises every year grows by 10% and has already exceeded the scope of the times of President Viktor Yanukovych, recalls Fiala. “And if you look at how many of these cases are brought to court, the amount of evidence seized during the search is used in the indictments, then we see a glaring picture of inefficiency, until 2016 this figure did not exceed 5%,” Afyan adds.
However, the continuation of the New Mail will most likely not be. “Poroshenko and his protege Yuriy Lutsenko greatly overestimate the extent to which they can use those tools that Yanukovich could use his time.They have the same level of public support that Yanukovych had, but they do not have complete control over the state system that is partially is controlled by various competing factions of the current conditional elite, – Vyshlinsky argues.- In addition, business and civil society are much stronger and much more organized in order to successfully confront them. Therefore, I will end all, like most of these actions, by the fact that the authorities will be covered with feces and will not get anything as a result other than an unpleasant smell. ”
The searches in the New post again placed an important problem on the agenda: the need to create a new analytical, not a power body, in the country, which alone has the right to do business checks. “This is primarily treated by the reform and updating of the cadres and the principles of the work of law enforcement bodies, without which cases like this will occur regularly,” Afyan concludes.
Information taken from: https://biz.nv.ua/ukr/publications/temna-poshta-shcho-stojit-za-chornoju-smuhoju-v-zhitti-kompaniji-2458815.html