For at least two weeks, 16,896 companies with Russian and Belarusian founders, owners or participants have been impersonally operating in Ukraine.
The Bureau of Economic Security of Ukraine discovered state purchases worth 65 million hryvnias, the executors of which were companies with Russian or Belarusian owners. This was reported by the BEB press service.
“BEB analysts discovered that after the start of a full-scale war, a number of enterprises with beneficiaries from Russia or Belarus not only participated in purchases at the expense of state funds, but also became their executors. That is, they sold goods or services,” the message says.
The amount of these blatant purchases amounted to about 65 million hryvnias.
“This is unacceptable, therefore the BEB will initiate consideration of the issue before the Cabinet of Ministers in order to completely prohibit the admission of companies from the Russian Federation and Belarus to public procurement,” the agency added.
In total, the bureau's analysts analyzed about 400,000 public procurements.
BEB does not report the period when the specified procurements became possible. “text-align: justify;”>The mandatory purchases in the Prozorro system that were canceled in February were returned by the Cabinet at the end of June.
At the same time, As of February 24, 16,896 active companies were registered in the Unified State Register of Ukraine, among the owners, founders or ultimate beneficiaries of which was at least one citizen or resident of the Russian Federation or the Republic of Belarus. Such datawas reported by the open data platform Opendatabot, referring to the data of the UDR.
By the holder The single state register of legal entities, individual entrepreneurs and public organizations is the Ministry of Justice.
ZN.UA wrote about a strange situation when two months after the start of the war, namely on April 13, 2022, the Ministry of Justice issued an order to close about a dozen registries and databases. Among them is the UDR.
Neither the relevant order nor any information on the website of the Ministry of Justice contained any clear explanation of this initiative. According to the initiative of the ministry, the administrators of the unified and state registers were obliged to delete all published information in the form of open data.
The initiative lasted only six days. Already on April 19, the Cabinet of Ministers issued Resolution No. 480, which restored access to the Ministry of Justice registers under certain conditions.
Read also: Two months after the start of the war, the Ministry of Justice decided to protect information about debtors and bankrupts the period when the Ministry of Justice has already closed, and the Cabinet of Ministers has not yet restored access to the registers, a question that law enforcement officers must answer. But the fact that there was a period when 16,896 companies with Russian founders, owners or participants ended up on the market without control is beyond doubt. The resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers entered into force on April 29.
For comparison, the situation regarding companies that worked in Russia was much more transparent.
It is known that since the full-scale invasion of the Russian army into Ukraine, almost 1,000 companies have announced their changes in their plans for Russia.
Some of them announced their complete withdrawal and closed down their activities, others only suspended their business or simply refused planned investments, some continued to work as usual.
Verify. whether an international company does not work with Russia, you can, for example, in the Boycott russia chatbot.
In addition, since the first days of the full-scale war, the professor and founder of the Institute of Senior Executives Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of Yale University with a team of experts and students follows companies that worked/work in Russia.
The researchers divided the companies into five groups based on their statements and actions, and publish them here, daily updating the list of companies that:
- Continue to operate in Russia without restrictions
- Continue operations, but do not invest in development
- Reduce operations
- Suspend operations
- Suspend operations in Russia.
