"Concord" may join the ranks of bankrupt banks

"Concord" may join the ranks of bankrupt banks

A bank, not unfamiliar to the secretary of the Dnipro City Council, Vyacheslav Mishalov, is suspected of illegal money transactions, creating fictitious tax credits, helping in illegal currency acquisitions, and transferring money offshore.

The bank "Concord," registered under the common-law wife of the secretary of the Dnipro City Council and a member of the Dnipro Jewish Community Board, Vyacheslav Mishalov — Olena Sosyedka-Mishalova, is in big trouble. The financial institution has come under the scrutiny of the National Police investigators, who suspect that the bank may be nothing more than a major conversion center. The consequences for the financial institution could be dire — up to the introduction of temporary administration.

According to the pre-trial investigation materials, unidentified individuals, having organized a series of fictitious business structures in Kyiv and the Dnipropetrovsk region, conspired with officials of JSCB "Concord." After that, non-cash funds began to flow into the accounts of these enterprises, opened in "Concord," from companies wishing to evade taxes, as well as "non-cash" from state enterprises whose leaders could have been engaged in actual embezzlement of state funds.

Vyacheslav Mishalov

According to the SSU materials, at least two dozen companies participated in the hryvnia operations of the conversion center, serviced at Mishalov’s "family" bank. Most of them, not having the necessary number of employees, storage facilities, or transportation, provided fictitious services of buying and selling material values to real existing businesses, helping them to evade taxes. Real goods were usually sold for cash at a higher price.

Law enforcement agencies characterize another fifty resident enterprises as pseudo-importers and pseudo-exporters, whose details were used to conduct illegal foreign economic financial and economic operations on the order of real operating entities and other "conversion centers." As a result, multimillion-dollar sums were taken offshore.

Foreign companies, registered in various offshore zones and Chinese advanced development territories, also figure in the case, assisting in carrying out pseudo-imports. Thanks to such operations, Ukrainian organizers and customers of the schemes obtained the ability to purchase currency on the interbank market through fictitious contracts.

Oleksandr Novikovskyi

Courts are currently busy issuing rulings to arrest the accounts of enterprises participating in illegal operations at the request of the National Police investigative group. In the second half of October, the Pechersk court in Kyiv made more than 20 such decisions on various enterprises. Some of them have names associated with well-known commercial structures, like "Evrazholding." But usually, they hide clone firms registered to fictitious owners. At the same time, according to the police, the services of the conversion center were openly used by structures of quite well-known people. Among them was listed LLC "Touristic Leader," whose accounts were blocked in several banks (this company is owned by a former member of the Cabinet of Ministers’ Entrepreneurs Council and ex-head of Turtess Travel in Ukraine, Oleksandr Novikovskyi).

The "blacklist" also includes state structures, such as SJSC "Ukrainian Polymetals," headed since 2015 by the former assistant of Roman Nasirov, who currently holds the position of head of the State Fiscal Service, Kostyantyn Lisnichyi. In addition, one cannot exclude the possibility that law enforcement might take an interest in the business directly owned by "Concord’s" proprietors. For example, the Kyiv restaurant Reef, opened a year ago on the site of the Ferrari dealership on Shota Rustaveli Street. Its key co-owner is currently Olena Sosyedka-Mishalova.

Olena Sosyedka-Mishalova

The investigation will determine the relation to the organization of dubious financial schemes involving "Concord" Mishalov and people from his close entourage. In the income declaration for 2015, the second person in the local self-government system of Dnipro, having listed in his possession 6 prestigious brand cars, 2 motorcycles, a leisure boat, 14 wristwatches, 5 rifles, a collection of vinyl records, and a "marine aquarium with exquisite fish" worth 1.7 million UAH, stated that he is a depositor of "Concord." In which, however, he keeps not the largest for him amounts — 47 thousand UAH and 668 dollars. The lion’s share of his funds, the owner of the trademarks "Dnipro" and VodKA Mishalov, prefers to keep in "cash" — almost 2.3 million in dollar equivalent.

To be continued...

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