Suspiciously cheap coal

In December 2022, in the Kemerovo Arbitration Court, the Federal Tax Service (FTS) managed to achieve the implementation of an important interpretation of tax legislation, which boils down to answering the question, who is the taxpayer in Russia – a legal entity or a business as a combination of its owner and business processes controlling it? In the context of bankruptcies, back in December 2017, the plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation (SC, plenum No. 53) gave an answer, and later, already in September 2020, the Presidium of the Supreme Court in case No. the creation of “profit centers” and “loss centers” is illegal. But only at the end of 2022, the principle was applied in the case of the scandalous and unraveled bankruptcy of recent years only after the intervention of the first persons of the state.

The once large mine, Aleksievskaya, changed its owner in 2016 and went bankrupt, and attempts to sell the mine were a disaster in 2021, the property complex of Aleksievskaya was withdrawn from the auction for 35 million rubles, the deal was challenged by the Federal Tax Service, and as a result, the stopped mine was sold for 85 million rubles. All buyers considered it deeply unprofitable, which, according to the documents, came out: Alekseevskaya sold energy coal at a price of about 745 rubles / ton, which was obviously below cost and periodically created salary debts for staff – about 200 million rubles. The Federal Tax Service, to which Aleksiyevskaya owed up to 2 billion rubles, has repeatedly pointed out that this is not really about the “mine” as a legal entity – around Aleksiyevskaya, the actual owner of both it and a number of other legal entities, Belarusian Yury Sazonov, created a network of companies engaged in (renting everything that is possible from the mine) and mining, and enrichment, and transport, and even laboratory control of coal. The Federal Tax Service also pointed this out to the Investigative Committee, which stubbornly refused to see criminal cases in this – as well as in the fact that at the end of the business chain was the Cypriot Energy Sistems EQ, controlled by Sazonov and selling coal for export already at 4 thousand rubles / t .

As a result, in order to eliminate the problem, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin had to come to the region, and the debts of Aleksievskaya on the salary of miners, 200 million rubles, were paid off from the budget. But in fact, the money will return to the budget, and many times over. The court in Kemerovo recognized that the constantly bankrupt “loss centers” and stable “profit centers” in the Alexievskaya case are the result of an underestimation of the cost of coal, and the requirements of the Federal Tax Service against the debtor increased to 4.3 billion rubles. They were presented to Yuri Sazonov and his “assistant companies” around Aleksievskaya, who actively issued loans to Sazonov, his family, and friends – so large that the miners were not enough to pay them. This, apparently, is half of the moral: thought up – do not abuse. The second half is more important: the Federal Tax Service sees business not as a collection of legal entities that transfer profits offshore, but as a transparent process that cannot be hidden.