Manager of the TOP-Service joint-stock company and Russian citizen Igor Shagin hired eight crimes against civil servants, committed from 1997 to 2000 in Kyiv, according to Kyiv public prosecutor Yuri Haisynsky at a press conference last Thursday.
All in all, according to deputy public prosecutor of Kyiv, Viktor Shevchenko, 12 contract murders were uncovered in 1997-2000, among them the murders of a well- known criminal boss Kniazev and deputy chief of Kyiv’s Zhovtnevy district tax administration Tamara Koliushko (1997), the attempted murder of Chairman of the Zhovtnevy district state administration Mykola Pidmohylny in April 1999, etc. According to Mr. Haisynsky, the officials suffered for their overly conscientious execution of their official duties. In particular, Ms. Koliushko inquired about the return to Ukraine of VAT on foodstuffs TOP-Service exported to Russia.
Igor Shagin has been taken into custody. Solving these crimes was complicated, according to Kyiv First Deputy Chief of Police Dmytro Opanasenko by the fact that “this commercial structures enjoyed the protection of a certain force, one of the People’s Deputies” who ran TOP-Service a year ago, although, as was repeatedly stressed at the press conference, his complicity in his former brainchild’s criminal activities has not yet been proven.
The uncovering of the criminal grouping Shagin allegedly led, which has been committing hired crimes for several years, is, according to Mr. Shevchenko, “perhaps the only case in Ukraine when all, both the middlemen and the killers, have been arrested. Also detained is the person who supplied the weapons.”
INCIDENTALLY
Meanwhile, Izvestiya (Moscow) reprinted last Thursday a K-marked article (this means the editors are not responsible for the contents of the material carried as advertisement) “Don’t Quarrel with Ukrainian Customs” from the Internet publication Economic and Political News (NEP) . The publication in fact links the “administrative conviction” (to quote NEP) of Mr. Shagin with TOP-Service’s lawsuits against the Kyiv regional and Hlukhiv customs offices. According to NEP information, “On April 28, there was a new court session in Hlukhiv, Sumy oblast, over the violation of customs rules against TOP-Service. The court ruled there were no violations. But company manager Igor Shagin never learned about this encouraging result.” Summing up the Shagin affair, the publication makes some foreign policy conclusions: “One can talk at length about the activation of foreign economic ties between Russia and Ukraine. But this will only be an empty sound, as long as our citizens perish — not somewhere on remote shores, but in ‘fraternal’ Ukraine.”
