Investigations by OCCRP and RISE Project have revealed that Ukrainian grain is being exported through tax-avoiding shell firms, leading to protests in neighboring countries like Romania. The war-torn country’s seaports have been blocked since Russia’s invasion, causing a surge in grain trucks crossing the Halmeu border crossing with Romania. However, a significant portion of the grain passing through these crossings has been exported by dubious Ukrainian companies accused of tax evasion and other crimes.
Over 300 Ukrainian companies have been under investigation by authorities for defrauding the state of at least $140 million in the first seven months of the invasion. These companies have been transferring products between “shell companies” to avoid paying taxes and other mandatory payments to the state. Some of the high-ranking officials are also accused of aiding in setting up the tax evasion mechanism.
Reporters cross-referenced trade data to understand the scale of grain exports and identified 80 suspect Ukrainian companies that delivered at least 1.7 million tons of grain worth $495 million to Romania, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Among the buyers were offshore companies, Hungarian firms with a history of tax evasion, and major international grain traders like COFCO International, Bunge, Viterra, and Ameropa Holding.
The investigation also uncovered connections to politically connected figures, individuals who claimed they were exploited into putting their names to companies, and complex ownership structures. Some of these companies under investigation have supplied major international traders with grain at significantly lower prices than the international market rates, leading to significant losses for the Ukrainian state.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has criticized European restrictions on grain imports, but the investigation reveals that the situation is more complex, with corruption within the country’s agricultural sector also contributing to the problem. Ukrainian authorities are struggling to prosecute these crimes within their own legal system, and the involvement of major international traders adds to the complexity. Efforts to stop these underground deals may require imposing fines on the international traders outside Ukraine.
The investigation exposes a network of tax-avoiding shell firms involved in Ukrainian grain exports, causing financial losses for the state and sparking protests in neighboring countries. The involvement of major international grain traders raises concerns about the transparency and accountability of the global grain trade.
Details of the OCCRP investigation
The Ukrainian probe began when investigators noticed that a large number of suspicious companies, many of them newly established, were evading taxes while trading in grain worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Documents filed by prosecutors show hundreds of companies are under investigation for allegedly being registered by “unidentified persons”, showing signs of “fictitious behavior,” and avoiding tax payments.
The people behind the scheme “transferred products from one ‘shell company’ to another … to ‘confuse’ the trade chains and avoid paying mandatory payments to the budget,” Ukraine’s Security Service said in January. The country’s Economic Security Bureau told reporters it could not provide any more information about the investigation, as it was still ongoing.
But additional details about the “black grain” trade are available in a report published in April by a parliamentary commission, which painted a dismal picture of Ukraine’s customs service.
The service failed to properly check over 600 potentially suspicious grain exporting companies it had been informed about by the taxation agency, the report said. These companies “had risks of tax evasion, failing to return their foreign currency earnings to Ukraine as required by law, and money laundering”.
These are precisely the factors that made “black” Ukrainian grain so cheap on the European market, the head of the commission and member of parliament Yaroslav Zhelezniak told reporters. Such crimes also lead to massive losses to Ukraine’s budget, he said.
“There are zero, zero, zero taxes on it,” Zhelezniak said, naming various police agencies he said have a presence at Ukrainian customs posts. “What are these scumbag law enforcement agencies there for, if they don’t see it?”
The companies were not systematically inspected, the commission’s report said. In some cases, it said, customs officers interviewed their directors only by phone or video chat and failed to verify their identities. The commission found that more than half of the exporters had filed no customs declarations at all, and a majority of those that were filed were processed within 90 minutes of receipt. One declaration took just nine minutes.
To see who is importing “black grain” from Ukraine and how much, reporters cross-checked customs data against the list of Ukrainian companies accused of violations, the names of several known Romanian, Czech, and Hungarian importers of Ukrainian grain, and several offshore companies that import Ukrainian grain.
The most prolific Ukrainian exporter on the list was Talstaktiv, a firm that prosecutors say “legalized income obtained by criminal means,” failed to pay income tax, and didn’t return its foreign-currency earnings. The company was established in February 2021, a year before Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Some time this year, while it was under investigation, Talstaktiv changed its address and took the new name Technotrade Supply. Over its short existence, the company’s registered owners changed three times.
According to customs data, the company exported more than $150 million worth of grain in 2021 and 2022 to two Hungarian companies that were ordered to be liquidated by a Hungarian court for failing to file financial documents and accurate contact information.
The court also prohibited these key Hungarian importers — called The Mark Global and Borko Trade — from conducting any further activity. Despite this, The Mark Global continued to trade. Between its dealings with Talstaktiv and other firms, the company imported 283 grain shipments worth $157 million between 2021 and 2022.
From grain sales made just to Borko Trade — which imported some $336 million worth of grain between 2020 and 2022 — the Ukrainian state lost an estimated $20 million in unpaid taxes, according to prosecutors’ documents. Hungarian authorities proved unable to establish who was really behind the company. According to the country’s tax and customs directorate, Borko Trade’s legal successor and the taxpayer’s contact information were both unknown, and mail sent to the company was returned due to a false postal code.
When reporters looked into who was behind The Mark Global, Borko, and two other associated firms, they found several young men listed as current or former shareholders or directors who appeared to be proxies, including an aspiring TikTok influencer. One of them told reporters he, and others, had been approached to put his name to the company while being treated in a psychiatric institution.
The trail to these men led through the director of The Mark Global at the time of its dissolution, a Lithuanian named Sergiejus Kolobovas. Kolobovas has no record of properties or businesses in his home country.
He was also the CEO of another Hungarian importer, Supstan, which bought sunflower oil from Ukraine worth $61.8 million in 2020 and 2021 before authorities ordered it to be dissolved in 2022.
The man listed as owning the company before Kolobovas — while these transactions took place — is Ondrej Stana, a 27-year-old Czech national who makes personal development videos on TikTok.
Stana told reporters he was being treated for bipolar disorder in the Czech city of Brno several years ago when a man named Albert approached him and other patients and asked them to “join” the companies.
“All this for 400 euros a month, which I received about seven times over two years, at most”, he said. “Very quickly I realized it was a mistake, but I didn’t know what to do. I asked them to remove my name”.
A Ukrainian named Albert Yanishevskiy, who was just 23 years old when these companies were set up in 2019, appears to be behind the email address used by The Mark Global in the Hungarian company registry.
Contacted by reporters, Yanishevskiy said he previously ran a law office in the Czech Republic that opened companies for a fee. He said The Mark Global was one such company, but said he had no role in it. He denied having approached anyone in a psychiatric clinic to open a company. Instead, he said he had contacted certain people to sign forms after being told by those setting up the companies “that this person will be the director of this company”.
The CEO of The Mark Global was Matej Bartík, a 30-year-old Slovak citizen. He too, Stana said, had been in the psychiatric hospital and been approached by Yanishevskiy. But when reporters reached Bartik, he denied that The Mark Global was his company and stopped responding.
Bartik’s trail, reporters found, leads back to alleged criminal activity in Ukraine.
At various times, he was both a managing director and a shareholder in a Czech computer and tech services company that had previously been owned by a Ukrainian man named Viktor Holovchyk.
Since 2019, Holovchyk’s companies have been under investigation in several cases of alleged money laundering, one of which involved the help of bank officials from the National Bank of Ukraine.
In one of these cases, prosecutors said that a Holovchyk company laundered money of illicit origin. In its defense, a lawyer for the company said the money in question represented advance payment from selling grain. The case is ongoing. Reporters were unable to reach Holovchyk for comment.
A third man mentioned by Stana as a psychiatric patient who had been asked to put his name to a company was Lukáš Neradílek. Stana sent reporters a photo of himself with Neradílek; another photo of Neradílek appears to show him in the psychiatric hospital. His name appears on two companies that purchased grain from Ukraine: Resale Consult in Slovakia and GD Delivery Consult in Hungary.
Resale Consult imported $43 million worth of grain from Ukraine’s Mykolaiv region between 2019 and 2021, and GD Delivery Consult bought soybeans worth $2 million in 2019.
Between them, these five companies — The Mark Global, Borko, Resale Consult, GD Delivery Consult, and Supstan — bought over $600 million worth of grain and sunflower oil from Ukraine between 2019 and 2022. They then sold these products to companies in Turkey, Korea, Belgium, Romania, and several African countries.
The Ukrainian MP Zablotskyy, who undertook his own investigation into the grain market four years ago, told reporters that big international traders were behind the current underground deals — and that the best way to stop them was to try to have fines imposed on them outside Ukraine.
“As practice has shown, it is very difficult to prosecute this in Ukraine with the law enforcement system we have and the corruption we have”, he said.
Reporters found that COFCO International Romania, a subsidiary of the Chinese multinational agriculture business COFCO International, was one company that had imported grain through Ukrainian companies under investigation.
COFCO’s Romanian subsidiary imported $2.3 million worth of sunflower seeds into Romania through Talstaktiv, paying just $0.40 a kilogram in May 2022 when the price on international grain exchanges was $0.67 per kilogram.
In total, COFCO International Romania imported over $145 million worth of grain into the country in the seven months between February and September for which data is available. Of this amount, about 145,500 tons of grain, worth nearly $37 million, came through Ukrainian companies now under investigation.
Of these, the largest of COFCO International Romania’s suppliers, exporting to it over $12 million worth of grain, is the Odesa-based Greenprime. At least for some shipments, the purchase price was much lower than normal: In August and September 2022, Greenprime exported rapeseed to COFCO International Romania for $0.38 a kilo, compared to $0.64 on the international market.
