The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) declared the suspicion to the sanctioned oligarch Pavlo Fuchs. He is accused of large-scale financial manipulations with strategic enterprises and systematic tax evasion.
This was reported in the press service of the SBU.
The investigation established that since 2018, he illegally took over the assets of Ukrainian companies worth more than 100 billion hryvnias.
Fuchs Holding sought out enterprises in the energy, machine-building and metallurgical industries of Ukraine that had loans from bankrupt banks. Scammers bought the "credit obligations" of these companies from banking institutions for nothing, which made it possible to interfere in their activities. Then the assets of Ukrainian factories and infrastructure facilities were frozen, their activities were blocked or brought to bankruptcy.
Fuchs and his accomplices hid the sources of financing the equipment and the real "customers". More than 100 related commercial structures were used for this purpose.
In this way, criminals received excess profits and avoided paying taxes. For example, only one of these devices caused losses to the state of almost 100 million hryvnias.
Fuchs and two top managers of the holding were informed of the suspicion under Part 3 of Art. 27, Part 3 of Art. 212 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (evasion of taxes, fees (mandatory payments).
Law enforcement officers seized the corporate rights and accounts of 101 companies, claim rights for more than 1 600 purchased loans, more than 240 real estate objects and vehicles of scheme participants. Part of the seized assets has already been handed over to the Asset Recovery and Management Agency (ARMA).
Fuchs called the SBUʼs statement "baseless." He believes that his suspicion is connected exclusively with "the personal economic interest of individuals in the leadership of the SBU and other structures." According to the oligarch, the actions of law enforcement officers are slander.
"I especially want to draw attention to the fact that the SBU announced a notification of suspicion against me as a citizen of Ukraine, which at the same time confirmed my lack of Russian citizenship and nullified the justification for the sanctions imposed on me in June 2021 — allegedly because I am a citizen of the Russian Federation ", — noted Fuchs.
- In June 2021, the NSDC of Ukraine imposed sanctions against Ukrainian businessmen Dmytro Firtash and Pavlo Fuchs, who, as inspections of the Verkhovna Radaʼs apparatus showed, were involved in illegally obtaining licenses for the extraction of minerals in Ukraine.
- Fuchs himself then called the sanctions of the National Security and Defense Council a personal revenge of the departmentʼs secretary Oleksiy Danilov.