Media: Ukraine loses 4 billion euro annually because of corruption at the customs
Ukraine loses over 4 billion euro annually due to corruption. "It is more than one tenth of all revenue of the budget and double the sum that Ukraine expects to receive in 2018 from the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the World Bank,” according to Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper’s investigation that it published on Monday, August 6.
Based on customs and transport consignment notes, Süddeutsche Zeitung described the fraud schemes used to avoid duties. Goods brought into the country are marked as other goods during customs registration. For example, umbrellas turn into brushes or mirrors. The state loses thousands of euro with every batch mis-declared this way.
According to the German newspaper, the police, prosecutors and SBU (Ukraine's Security Service) employees are all involved in the customs fraud. Customs officers create and control new dummy companies for illegal transactions.
According to the results of a survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), in 2018, 73% of Ukrainian companies faced corruption charges compared with 56% in 2016. The world average is only 25%.
A third of the companies surveyed in Ukraine stated that bribes were solicited from them in the past two years. In general, nearly half of the respondents believe that they dealt with economic crimes, which is a 5% increase from two years ago.
PwC stated that misappropriation of assets was at 62% in 2016 but at 46% this year; procurement fraud was at 25% two years ago and at 33% today. PwC asserts that those remain the most common of such crimes in Ukraine together with corruption and bribes.