During the almost two years of the Great War, the judicial system handed down 80 sentences against a hundred organizers of schemes to smuggle evaders abroad. Only one in ten cases resulted in imprisonment for the defendants.
At the beginning of February 2024, the Unified State Register of Court Decisions contained information on the consideration of 770 cases regarding violations of Article 332 of the Criminal Code (illegal smuggling of persons across the state border of Ukraine) using the state system “Shlyakh”. Those accused under this article face a sentence of imprisonment for three to nine years, notes “Economic Truth”.
sentences have already been announced in 80 cases involving 101 defendants . Although almost all of these individuals were found guilty by the courts, only eight people were fully punished. In other cases, the courts found the suspects guilty but imposed milder sentences than those provided for by the Criminal Code.
The point is that the representatives of Themis administered justice nominally. In the operative part, they approved the “plea agreement” and gave the status of legality to the terms of punishment agreed upon by the prosecutor and the accused. This is permitted by Chapter 35 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.
This method of handling cases by law enforcement officers has become commonplace, for example, in anti-corruption proceedings. It allows prosecutors to move cases quickly and demonstrate, albeit formally, almost 100% effectiveness.
However, it has a downside. As the statistics obtained by the EP show, this allows the organizers of schemes to take evaders abroad to work in this business almost risk-free, because they always have the option of “making a deal with the investigation.”.
Typically, two groups of people are involved in this business. The first is represented by “charitable” organizations, sometimes with the involvement of military administrations, which have the right to submit persons of draft age for inclusion in the “Shlyakh” system.
The word “charities” is not in quotes by chance. Journalistic investigations show that the most active applicants for inclusion in the “Shlyakh” system were related organizations that were not generally noticed in volunteer activities.
The second group of scheme organizers is represented by real and fake transport companies that supposedly hire drivers, but in reality sell the right to leave Ukraine for $5-7 thousand. To do this, such companies obtain licenses from the State Transport Security Service (“Ukrtransbezpeka”), which also administers “Shlyakh”, for international road transport.
According to her, out of the almost 70 thousand existing carrier licenses, 36 thousand were obtained in 2022-2023. It cannot be said that all this is abuse. Since 2022, road transport has saved Ukraine's trade activity against the backdrop of the blockade of ports. However, simultaneously with the surge in issued permits, Ukrtransbezpeka began to massively revoke licenses issued after the start of the Great War from the end of 2022.
After the outbreak of the Great War, the state massively distributed licenses for international transportation. Presumably, many fraudsters obtained them.
For example, LLC “Butravel” received a license in the summer of 2022. As law enforcement officers later established, it was for organizing a business of illegally transporting tax evaders abroad. On March 3, 2023, when the company was involved in the relevant criminal proceedings, its license was revoked. However, during this time, the company managed to transport at least ten tax evaders abroad.
In total, according to Ukrtransbezpeka, since the end of 2022, 2.2 thousand licenses issued after the start of the Great War have been canceled. However, it seems that the loss of a license and a suspended sentence are not the only threat to the organizers of the schemes. Thus, the director of the Mix Travel Group company was fined 102 thousand UAH. It is not surprising that the number of people who want to make money on this is growing, because there is virtually no punishment for such actions.
