The Brooklyn-Kiev stevedoring company’s General Director Yurii Hubankov has said that officials from the Odessa regional prosecutor’s office began seizing all the company’s documents dating back to the past three years on Monday under a false formal pretext, the Kontekst-Prichernomorie news agency reports.
Hubankov said this on 27 April during a press conference on the actions of the regional prosecutor's office at the Kontekst-Prichernomorie news agency.
"An extraordinary event took place today. During the daytime - literally at 11 o'clock - nine people led by a prosecutor from the Odessa regional prosecutor’s office entered the Brooklyn-Kiev company with the aim of seizing documents based on a court ruling. The ruling states that we had a tax credit of UAH 640,000. One small incident served as the excuse to seize documents dating back three years from all the three companies performing construction work for us. These are no shell companies, all of these companies exist, and they have all the documents. Moreover, these are leading companies on the construction market,” Hubankov said.
According to him, the company experienced similar events in 2012, 2013, and 2014. He described it as a blatant attempt by the prosecutor's office to conduct a campaign against Brooklyn-Kiev. “The prosecutor's office tried two or three years ago to find flaws one way and then another way. Then they conducted a number of inspections - which uncovered nothing, of course - under the previous government and even under the current government. Now, since nothing happened, a decision to take the documents themselves was made,” he said.
He expressed the belief that the regional prosecutor's office misunderstands the law on public-private partnership. It is not when you are trying to front one company. That is the wrong partnership. The right partnership is when there is an investor, and the Brooklyn-Kiev company is one of the biggest investors, not only in the port of Odessa, but also - perhaps - in the entire Odessa region because we have invested more than 280 million in the economy of the country in the past 10 years. I think this in no way facilitates improvement of the investment climate and attraction of investors to the country, talk less of the Odessa region,” he said.
