Coal smoke Tuapse

The co-owners of the largest port found a secret “door to Europe”

The investigation into the case of mass violations and thefts in the Tuapse seaport was completed by the Investigative Committee (IC) under the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation. According to him, the managers of the Tuapse Ship Repair Plant (TSRZ), which owns six berths, and representatives of its related LLC Firm Kobos were engaged in large-scale smuggling and money laundering. Along the way, they managed to deceive most of the enterprises that shipped coal for export through the port. As the Investigative Committee notes, this story is only part of a large-scale investigation by the Ministry of Internal Affairs about the situation around the port of Tuapse. Thus, the issue of initiating a case against a number of officials of the Tuapse customs, who, according to the investigation, “turned a blind eye” to illegal operations, is now being considered.

According to representatives of the insurance company, in 1994, one of the port employees, Vladimir Korchagin, created Kobos Firm LLC and became its general director. "Cobos" began providing forwarding services - its representatives received cargo from Russian enterprises in Tuapse and loaded it onto ships. Soon Korchagin was promoted and took the post of chief state inspector of port supervision of the maritime administration of the port. At this rank, he could no longer head a private enterprise and refused the post of general director of Cobos, although, according to the Investigative Committee, he retained full control over the company. At the end of the 90s, Cobos signed an agreement with TSRZ to lease berths and almost all of the plant’s equipment: cranes, lifting mechanisms, machines, etc. According to the Investigative Committee, the agreement was nothing more than a fiction, and all loading work at the port was still carried out by TSRZ, which did not have the appropriate license from the Ministry of Transport (Cobos had a license), in connection with which a criminal case was initiated. However, it was only a prologue to the main part of the investigation - on the grandiose scams with coal arriving at the port.

A number of large foreign companies, including Unitrading Ltd. (Hamburg) and Eagle Energy (Belgium), agreed with Cobos that shipments of Russian coal would come to it from Kuzbass, and he would organize their loading onto ships. In 1998, the first trains with coal arrived in Tuapse, which were immediately transported to the customs control zone. Moreover, Tuapse customs recognized all territories of the TSRZ and a number of other large port structures as such a special zone. According to the law, cargo cannot leave the customs control zone and must from there, after inspection by the State Customs Committee, be sent only abroad. In Tuapse, everything happened differently.

According to the Investigative Committee, representatives of Cobos developed several fraudulent schemes. One of them was based on the fact that in Russia cars of different capacities are used - from 50 to 69 tons. For example, businessmen brought ten 55-ton wagons with coal to the ship, and in the documents indicated that ten 60-ton wagons were shipped. When transporting by sea, the cargo being shipped is not weighed as such, but its weight is determined by eye, based on the draft of the ship. Therefore, no one noticed the shortage of coal. According to the second scheme, Kobos used the fact that all contracts with carriers of bulk goods by rail provide for a clause stating that 3-5% of the weight of the cargo may be lost along the way. This usually never happens with coal - on the contrary, precipitation only increases its weight. But Cobos, according to the Investigative Committee, knowing about such terms of the contracts, always poured out some of the coal from the arriving trains. In the third scheme, businessmen replaced different types of coal supplied by clients. Instead of the most expensive type of SSPC ($30 per ton), representatives of the company could fill the ships with a mixture of SSPC and TPK ($10 per ton).

Representatives of Cobos, according to the Investigative Committee, loaded the surplus coal obtained in this way into separate trains, which were driven from the customs control zone to the nearest dead ends. There, for the “left” cargo, documents were falsified that the enterprises “Unitrading Ltd” and “Eagle Energy” (who did not even know about it) were transporting it to Turkey for the company “Rekonika” (Bahamas). The latter structure was founded, according to investigators, by the same Mr. Korchagin. With such documents, the trains returned to the customs control zone, the coal calmly passed the State Customs Committee check, was loaded onto ships and went abroad. From 1998 to 2000 alone, eight ships with smuggled coal were sent from the port of Tuapse.

In addition, the Investigative Committee found out that representatives of TSRZ and Cobos also managed to launder about $10 million. Enterprises wishing to use any services of the company or plant (loading, dispatch, delivery, etc.) were asked not to pay them , and transfer money to the account of the same “Rekonika” in the Latvian Parex Bank. Since most of the clients were registered abroad, they agreed to this. Payment was made at the rate of $5 per ton of goods loaded onto ships in the port of Tuapse. However, as the Investigative Committee established, only the remainder came to Russia from these deductions. At one time, Rekonika entered into a strange agreement with TSRZ and Kobos, from which it followed that the plant and the company carried out all loading work exclusively on behalf of Rekonika, which is why they could only count on receiving $2 per ton of cargo . It has not yet been possible to establish how much money was received into Reconika’s accounts in Parex Bank, but in Tuapse, about $7.5 million was received indirectly through local branches of Sberbank and Yugbank. Such manipulations were regarded by the Investigative Committee as money laundering. Charges in this case were brought against Vladimir Korchagin, the now former general director of TSRZ Fyodor Morozov (he was removed from his post by the plant's board of directors at the end of last year) and a number of other smaller persons. The investigation was completed the other day, and the materials will soon be sent to court.

The accused themselves, in turn, launched a fight against the operatives involved in this story. In particular, they stated that when an employee of the Tuapse Department of Internal Affairs, Viktor Pavlenko, came to the territory of the TSRZ for an inspection, he thereby entered a secret facility. A case was even opened based on this fact, and Pavlenko was arrested. But the Tuapse court acquitted the operative, however, due to non-exonerating circumstances. This did not suit him, and Pavlenko recently appealed this decision to a higher court.

Alexander SHVAREV