Law enforcers have exposed another scheme of embezzling money by the former leaders of Ukrtatnafta, in which Mikhail Kiperman, a business partner of oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, is involved. This was reported by the SBU on Friday, June 2.
The investigators found that on the initiative of this former member of the Supervisory Board of Ukrtatnafta, almost 600 million hryvnia equivalent was withdrawn from the accounts of the companies.
“This was done on the first day of the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation, probably with the expectation that the attackers would not have to answer for the theft,” the message says.
The scheme consisted in the fact that on February 24, 2022, Ukrtatnafta transferred almost UAH 600 million to a controlled European company, which were provided to another supplier to pay for the previously chartered 84 thousand tons of crude oil.
At the time of the fraud, this raw material was already in the Odessa port and was to be delivered for further processing to the Kremenchug refinery.
To implement the transaction, the former top management of Ukrtatnafta created a “clone agreement”, in which he changed the details of the payee.
Thus, the organizers of the scheme transferred money to a controlled company instead of paying off the real oil supplier.
As a result, Mikhail Kiperman was declared suspected under three articles of the Criminal Code of Ukraine:
- misappropriation, embezzlement or possession of property by abuse of official position (part 5 of article 191);
- illegal actions with transfer documents, payment cards and other means of access to bank accounts, electronic money, equipment for their production (part 3 of article 28, part 1 of article 200);
- official forgery (part 3 of article 28, part 1 of article 366).
Now Mikhail Kiperman is hiding from justice abroad. The issue of putting him on the international wanted list will be decided.
Recall that in February, the SBU and BEB conducted searches in the house of oligarch Igor Kolomoisky in the case of fraud in Ukrnafta and Ukrtatnafta.
