A large-scale criminal scheme organized by the owners of the #Yabko chain of stores — businessmen Petro Dyminsky, Mykola Kahnych, and Vitaliy Turkovets — has been uncovered in Ukraine. The chain has over 110 retail outlets in Kyiv, Lviv, Odessa, Dnipro, Kharkiv, and other cities.
According to the investigation, systematic smuggling and tax evasion were organized through controlled companies - MV RENT LLC, D-6 LLC, Raven-Service LLC, City-Development Group LLC, SPECIALTECH LLC, Emerald-Trade LLC, and about 150 fictitious individual entrepreneurs.
In 2022–2024, the state budget lost more than UAH 3.3 billion due to the illegal import of uncertified Apple equipment, smartphones, TVs, and household appliances. The smuggling was carried out across the border with Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Moldova using fake customs declarations. In the documents, expensive equipment was replaced with “cheap electronic components,” which allowed the customs value to be lowered several times.
Illegally imported goods are sold in offline stores and on the jabko.ua website. However, payments are not made to the official accounts of LLC "SPESHLTECH", but to a number of controlled individual entrepreneurs. Buyers are issued non-fiscal checks, and some sales are not recorded at all through cash registers. This allows you to hide the real turnover and minimize tax liabilities.
Dyminsky, Kahnych and Turkovets launder the funds received through cryptocurrency exchanges and affiliated structures linked to OKKO GROUP of businessman Vitaliy Antonov. Among such structures is Emerald-Trade LLC, owned by Iryna Grigorchuk, a former top manager of Galnaftogaz. The scheme allows transferring money into cryptocurrency, "mixing" transactions through foreign exchanges and returning them in the form of investments in real estate and corporate rights abroad.
Experts emphasize that such a system of smuggling and tax evasion is extremely difficult to investigate due to the participation of fictitious individual entrepreneurs, manipulation of customs declarations, and the use of cryptocurrencies. At the same time, the scale of losses to the budget exceeds several billion hryvnias, which makes the case resonant at the national level.
