Translated material
funny money
The Ministry of Internal Affairs searched Russneft bankers
The Investigative Committee (IC) under the Ministry of Internal Affairs recently conducted a new series of searches as part of an investigation into a criminal case of tax evasion by OJSC Oil Company RussNeft. Investigators did not bother the oil workers themselves this time, but visited the offices of four banks with which the company works.According to investigators, some employees of these banks - both former and current - allegedly helped Russneft evade taxes. However, although the fact of tax evasion is considered established by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, so far it is difficult to call this investigation particularly successful. At the moment, the materials of the criminal case contain documents about the company’s failure to pay taxes in the amount of only 1.7 million rubles. Considering the scale and turnover of RussNeft, this claim cannot be called serious. However, the Investigative Committee believes that the main results of the investigation will follow later.
As a source close to the investigation told Vremya Novostei, the searches began on the morning of April 5. Several groups of Investigative Committee employees, accompanied by Moscow riot police, simultaneously raided the head offices of International Financial Technologies (MFT) Bank LLC at Shmitovsky Proezd, 10/7, Moscow branch of Rus-Bank at Myasnitskaya, 43, building 2, OJSC "Mosstroyeconombank" on Profsoyuznaya Street, 78, to the additional office of B&N Bank at Mozhaiskoye Shosse, 11, and two of its structural divisions - the accounting department at Obrucheva, 23, building 3, and the security service at Peter Alekseev Street, 12.
Investigators were interested in all unaccounted documentation related to the transfer of funds in the interests of Russneft, and press. “During the search, we seized a decent amount of rough records that were not included in any official document,” said our source in law enforcement agencies. -- Now we have reason to believe that current and former employees of these banks developed a scheme to evade value added tax (VAT) and for a year and a half - from the summer of 2004 to the end of 2005 - helped Russneft evade payment taxes. This is what we have been able to accurately establish so far. Now we know exactly the amount that the company owed the state during this period - 1.7 million rubles. It is clear that for such a large company this is ridiculous money, but for some reason it did not want to pay it on time, and now the investigation into this fact is going on very intensively. In addition, we were able to find out that all these banks are in one way or another connected with the Bean group and the managers of Russneft. There are no suspects in the case yet, but there are people for whom we already have questions. We have already begun to interrogate the top officials of MFT Bank, Rus Bank and Mosstroyekonombank, as well as security and accounting employees of B&N Bank.
The criminal case in which the searches took place appeared in March 2007 as a result of combining four cases into one proceeding, three of which were initiated in the fall of 2006 based on an audit conducted by employees of the Department of Economic Security (DES) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Tax Inspectorate. The inspectors then came to the conclusion that the managers of three Russneft subsidiaries - ZAO Nafta-Ulyanovsk, OAO Ulyanovskneft and OAO Aganneftegazgeologiya (ANGG) - were engaged in “illegal business.”
During the audit, it was found that the managers of Nafta-Ulyanovsk received a profit of 700 million rubles from the sale of oil produced in violation of license agreements, and about 2 billion rubles of Ulyanovskneft. ANGG, according to investigators, caused almost 5 billion rubles in damage to the environment and the federal budget.
As a result, the Prosecutor General's Office demanded the initiation of criminal cases against three companies. But due to lack of evidence, these cases were temporarily suspended. After at the end of February, investigators from the Investigative Committee under the Ministry of Internal Affairs conducted searches at RussNeft itself and three of its subsidiaries controlled by the company’s president, Mikhail Gutseriev, the criminal cases were resumed. A fourth was added to them - about tax evasion, after which they were combined into one proceeding, and the investigation was entrusted to the Investigative Committee.
During searches in February, investigators seized financial, accounting documents and reporting information on the company's activities on electronic media. As the Ministry of Internal Affairs explained then, these investigative actions were necessary to “discover and secure evidence relevant to the investigation of the criminal case.” According to a Vremya Novostey source, after the examination it became clear that “a very large number of people working in the banks through which Russneft conducted its cash flows were involved in this case.”
“In addition, we received data on exactly when the amounts on which taxes were not paid were spent,” the source shared. - Now it remains to find out why they were not paid. “We also continue to find out whether the remaining subsidiaries of RussNeft (and there are 32 of them in total) were legally developing a total of about 170 fields.”
The banks themselves, where the searches took place, preferred to leave this information without any comments yesterday.