It's no secret that Artem Sytnyk spent 6 years wrongfully terrorising my business out of personal animosity. After all, my sister's advisor was a key witness in Sytnyk's case that found him guilty of corruption, and that corrupt official was simply taking revenge on me. Of course, those cases ended in nothing due to their obvious frivolousness and bias.
For 6 years, NABU was persistently opening and closing various cases against the company. One of the first cases against me was based on an allegation of unlawful collection of tax refunds for the construction of two industrial egg farms, Avis and Chornobaivska, the latter being the largest in Europe. NABU’s case was based on a wild and easily refutable conspiracy theory that the farms simply didn’t exist, a preposterous allegation made in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary including plenty of video footage shot by TV crews and the fact that the farms had been selling fresh and high quality eggs to Ukrainian consumers and exporting them to foreign markets. As a result, this case was closed due to its obvious frivolousness while those who had been terrorising my business continued to draw their large salaries.
Unfortunately, one of those farms, Chornobaivske, has suffered severe losses as a result of Russian aggression. Several million laying hens died there being cut off from feed and water supply. It was widely reported by leading global and Ukrainian media, the tragic story of the farm was told from the rostrum of the UN. The UN had no reason to doubt those farms existed but Artem Sytnyk and his henchmen did.
NABU agents decided not to stop at this frivolous case and opened a fresh one on charges of alleged embezzlement of funds provided by the National Bank for refinancing VAB Bank.
That case was opened against me and the then acting governor of the National Bank of Ukraine Pysaruk, who’s currently CEO of the Ukrainian subsidiary of Raiffeisenbank. The case was reopened and closed 5 times by the investigative authorities or by court order for lack of evidence until it was eventually dismissed finally. But in 2019, the case was wrongfully reopened again and transferred to NABU by former Deputy Prosecutor General Kasko on the instructions of the then Prosecutor General Ruslan Riaboshapka. Importantly, NABU opened the case on allegations of collusion between me and the then acting governmemt of the NBU Pysaruk. Influential international financial institutions interceded on Pysaruk’s behalf. He later won his court case against NABU. But in a completely illogical and unlawful move and in order to retain the ability to terrorise my business, NABU divided the case in two.
This is quite unprecedented in the history of jurisprudence: if Pysaruk and I colluded, as NABU alleges, how can the case be divided? If we did not collude, then the case should be closed. Obviously, the case had no criminal merits, it only served as a tool to slowly but steadily destroy my company.
To make matters worse, we became cut off from sources of credit as the wrongful prosecution unfolded with 37 operating companies of the group having to shut down and 13,000 jobs lost as of early 2021.
Our trading companies in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Iraq, Liberia, Saudi Arabia had to close down too after losing their ability to sustain themselves financially. Avangard, a chicken egg producer which is part of the Ukrlandfarming group, has seen its production volume slump by 50%. As of April 2021, the group’s cattle herd decreased from 52 thousand to 15.7 thousand head. Taxable income dropped as a consequence of reduced production volume causing the government to lose up to UAH 1 billion worth of tax revenue compared to the previous period.
It would seem that with the departure of Artem Sytnyk, who was found corrupt by court, the unlawful pressure on me would end. However, Sytnyk's crony Andriy Kaluzhynskyi remained at NABU and continued the work of his patron, Sytnyk. Kaluzhynskyi made the headlines back in 2005 while serving as a prosecutor in Kyiv Region when he ran over and killed a pedestrian at a well-lit crossroads. The case was promptly ‘swept under the carpet’, the prosecutor escaped punishment and even got promoted at NABU under the leadership of his child’s godfather, Artem Sytnyk. In 2018, the police reopened the case due to the obvious illegality of its closure. However, the new case was also buried, this time over the statute of limitations. Later it became known that Kaluzhynskyi had tried to "negotiate" with the mother of the man he had run over and killed at the pedestrian crossing by offering her a laughable 3,000 hryvnias for it.
This story was reported by the 1+1 TV channel on the show ‘X-Files’ in an episode entitled ‘Death under the Wheels of a NABU Detective’.
Now Sytnyk's pal Kaluzhynskyi has taken over the terrorising of my company by throwing another ridiculous accusation at me. Just to reiterate, the allegation is that the sequence of VAT refunding was allegedly violated, while the VAT refund itself was lawful. It appears as though they are going out of their way to implicate me in any case, however frivolous, just to go after me. The present allegation, like all the previous ones, has no merits. But it will create negative consequences for the company and the state. Kaluzhynskyi is trying to take up where the occupiers left off and and finish off the companies that employ 13,000 workers and continue to pay billions in taxes. Ukraine’s chicken egg production has already decreased dramatically by a staggering 20% due to the ongoing destruction of assets by the Russian occupiers causing prices to rise sharply. If we allow Sytnyk's cronies to continue to use NABU as an instrument of revenge, we may lose those few companies that were lucky enough to survive the enemy's bombing.
Without a doubt, we will defend ourselves using all available remedies that the law affords us. And we will continue supporting our Armed Forces, as we have been doing since the early days of the large-scale aggression against our country. We believe in Ukraine’s victory over the occupier, we believe in the victory of justice, we believe in the triumph of law in Ukraine.