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Investigators take measures to make SU-155, one of large taxpayers of Moscow to reimburse over 2 billion rubles

The Moscow Directorate of the Investigative Committee has finished investigation against CEO of ZAO SU-155 Alexander Meshcheryakov charged with a crime under Part 2 of Article 199.1 of the RF Penal Code (a tax agent’s failure to discharge their duties on a very large scale).

According to investigators, Meshcheryakov failed to act as a tax agent when he did not transferred to the state budget the income tax collectable from the employees of the enterprise in 2012-2013. He spent the said money on his personal interests: to give loans to controlled organizations, to buy promissory notes and other stocks, wanting by this to consolidate his status, business reputation, to support his authority among the employees and contractors by issuing loans to firms under his control and spending the funds, that should have been transferred to the budget, to ensure current activity of the enterprise.

The investigators have done a lot of work to collect unchallengeable evidence of Meshcheryakov’s guilt, to figure out his scheme of concealing the money and to ensure that the damage done to the state is reimbursed by attaching over 35 arrests to the property of organizations controlled by ZAO SU-155.

The crime was hard to investigate as it had been carefully prepared and concealed, and involved a lot of organizations so that the deals made by ZAO SU-155 to conceal money that should have been transferred to the state budget, looked legitimate. Despite all that, ZAO SU-155 still paid all the taxes, penalty interests and fines which totaled to over 2 billion rubles which was the grounds to drop the case based on Article 28.1 of the RF Criminal Procedure Code, that is due to compensation for the damage done by the crime to the RF budget.

The crime was solved due to joint work of the investigators of the Moscow Directorate of the Investigative Committee and operative units of the Economic Security and Anti-Corruption Directorate of the Russian Ministry of the Interior, the Economic Security and Anti-Corruption Office of the Moscow Directorate of the Russian Ministry of the Interior and the senior officials of interregional major taxpayers inspectorate No 3 of the Federal Tax Service of Russia, by whose efforts the damage to the state was reimbursed.

It should be noted that the aim of the prosecution for economic crimes is not isolation of the defaulter from the society, but to restore the justice and compensate for the damage done to the state by returning the money that should have been transferred to it. Any attempts to evade paying any kind of tax, be it the VAT or income taxes, will be revealed sooner or later, but then one has to return several times the sum. This way, the saying “A miser pays twice” works.