Pseudo-charity as a cover for car smuggling: ESBU sent the case to the court

 In the Lviv region, authorities stopped a scheme to illegally import cars registered as charitable aid. Detectives of the Territorial Office of the ESBU in the Lviv region completed the pretrial investigation and sent the indictment to court regarding the organizer of the scheme.

The Director of the ESBU, Oleksandr Tsyvinskyi, announced this on his Telegram channel.

"The cars entered Ukraine under the guise of aid to the front but ended up in sales advertisements. Humanitarian transport must be used for its intended purpose," the Director of the ESBU emphasized.

He also noted that the ESBU is working on the mechanism through which such schemes arise. In particular, the exchange of data between the ESBU, the STS, and the Main Service Center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs allows seeing not an isolated operation but the connections between them, establishing the patterns by which they operate, and detecting similar cases.

The investigation established that the man used a legal entity to cover up the illegal import of vehicles. For its state registration, he submitted documents with knowingly false information.

Subsequently, the suspect purchased 17 cars abroad and organized their movement across the customs border of Ukraine.

During the import, the vehicles were declared as charitable aid to hide the real purpose of their movement and to avoid proper customs control. In this way, the man tried to give the smuggling the appearance of legitimate charitable activity.

The total value of the illegally imported cars amounts to over 2.19 million UAH.

The actions of the accused are qualified under Part 1 of Article 201-4 (smuggling of excisable goods) and Part 1 of Article 205-1 (forgery of documents submitted for the state registration of a legal entity) of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.

Procedural guidance was carried out by prosecutors of the Lviv Regional Prosecutor's Office. Operational support was provided by the 6th Volyn Border Guard Detachment and the Department of Strategic Investigations in the Volyn region of the DSI of the National Police of Ukraine.

According to Article 62 of the Constitution of Ukraine, a person is considered innocent of committing a crime and cannot be subjected to criminal punishment until their guilt is proven in accordance with the law and established by a court verdict.