A court acquitted the directors of companies accused of embezzlement in Odessa

The Kyiv District Court of Odessa acquitted the heads of two companies who had been accused of inflating the cost of transporting equipment for substations and thereby embezzling public funds.

According to the Center for Public Investigations, citing the court’s verdict, the prosecution failed to prove that the defendants’ actions constituted a crime. It turned out that investigators were unable to find evidence that the company executives had embezzled funds. As a result, the court found the company executives not guilty and acquitted them due to lack of evidence of guilt. 

On trial were the directors of Chornomorenergospetsmontazh LLC and Prime Logistic Group LLC, who were charged with embezzlement of public funds and forgery of official documents.

Law enforcement officials established that following massive rocket attacks on the power grid in the Odesa region and an accident at the Usatove substation, which left approximately 500,000 consumers without power, private companies were involved in the urgent transportation and installation of autotransformers to restore power supply.

According to the prosecution, the officials exploited the emergency situation to carry out a scheme involving the overpricing of logistics services. In the documents, they indicated that the equipment was transported internationally and cost over 1.5 million hryvnias, although the actual cost of individual rail shipments within the Odesa region was only about 116,000 hryvnias. The difference between the actual and declared costs served as the basis for the illegal receipt of budget funds.

One of the incidents involved the transportation of an autotransformer from the “Artsyz” substation to “Usatovo.” According to the case materials, due to the inclusion of false information in the work completion reports, the state-owned enterprise unjustifiably paid over 1.4 million hryvnias.

Another incident involved the transportation of equipment from the “Podilsk” substation to “Adzhalyk.” In this case, the actual cost of rail transportation was approximately 335,000 hryvnias, but the documents indicated over 2.6 million hryvnias. As a result, according to the investigation’s estimates, the state lost an additional 2.29 million hryvnias.

The total amount of losses in the two incidents exceeded 3.7 million hryvnias. Both executives were charged under articles regarding the misappropriation of property through abuse of official position on a particularly large scale under martial law and official forgery of documents.

Кирило Бойко