How Serhiy Lyseyuk received apartments and cars for free as a tax officer
How free land near Kyiv brought Serhiy Lysiuk more than a million
With whom Serhiy Lysiuk organized a car smuggling scheme in Volyn
Participants of the smuggling octopus of Volyn chief tax officer Serhiy Lyseyuk
According to his declarations, the head of the tax service of the Volyn region, Serhii Lyseyuk, is a poor civil servant without housing, transport and monetary assets. But at the same time, he sometimes drives a Volkswagen Touareg, then a Toyota Camry, in which he visits the capital's expensive boutiques. Cars from abroad appear in Lutsk thanks to smuggling schemes, on which Lyseyuk, the chief Volyn tax collector himself, "warms up".
On May 16, 2024, Serhii Lyseyuk, the chief tax collector of the Volyn region, came to Kyiv as usual to spend the money "earned" on the job in the capital's restaurants and on shopping in expensive boutiques — in particular, in his favorite one of the most expensive multi-brand boutiques, Symbol. But this time everything went wrong.
While driving a black 2018 Toyota Camry with license plate КА5572МС, Lyseyuk literally "flew" into the car in front at high speed. According to eyewitnesses, the impact was so strong that the car into which the 33-year-old head of the Volyn tax office crashed into another car in front, and Lyseyuka's Toyota was damaged beyond repair as a result of this accident.
Whether Serhiy Lyseyuk was in a drunken state at the time of the accident is still unknown. The police drew up a report on him and a resolution on an administrative violation under Article 124 of the Code of Administrative Offenses. The first court session to consider this resolution was held in the Svyatoshyn District Court of Kyiv on August 13, where the court scheduled the next court session for September 4. Given the way in which administrative decisions under this article are considered, such a postponement of the case may indicate the presence of additional aggravating circumstances in this story: decisions on ordinary traffic accidents are mostly considered in one session.
It is interesting, but it is impossible to find any Toyota Camry of 2018 in the declaration of Serhiy Lyseyuk. In principle, he has not declared any car. According to Osint Global, the car that the taxman crushed in an accident in Kyiv did not belong to him, but to a certain 26-year-old Makhina, Dmytro Valeriyovych, who is the son of Valery Makhina, the head of the department at the State Police Department in the Volyn region, i.e., a subordinate of Serhiy Lyseyuk.
After the accident, Dmytro Makhinya sold what was left of his Toyota. Since July 20, Lesya Berladyn, the wife of Roman Berlandin, an employee of the State Fiscal Service University of Ukraine in Irpin, where Serhiy Lyseyuk worked in 2017-2018, became the owner of the car. That is, they were colleagues with Roman. Most likely, having carried out such manipulations with the broken Toyota, the chief tax collector of Volhynia decided, on the one hand, to remove the clues as far as possible from himself as to where he got the car, and on the other hand, from his subordinate Valery Makhini. Because many questions arise. First of all, on what grounds does Serhiy Lyseyuk ride the car of his subordinate's son. And, secondly, how did the 26-year-old son of the head of the regional tax department with a salary of barely UAH 25,000 a month get a car worth several thousand dollars?
And there are answers to these questions, which we will talk about below.
Who is Serhiy Lysiuk?
Serhiy Lyseyuk is a typical Ukrainian civil servant. A native of Lutsk, from an ordinary family. He studied at the State Tax University in the city of Irpin, first worked as an operational officer in Lutsk, then as a senior operational officer for particularly important cases of the Main Directorate of the Federal Tax Service in the Rivne region. This was followed by a year of work as an inspector at the State Fiscal Service University of Ukraine, where he studied. From 2019 to 2021, he worked as the chief state auditor - inspector in the Office of Large Taxpayers of the State Tax Service. From June 2021 to July 2022, he held the position of deputy head of the Western Interregional Department of the State Tax Service of Ukraine for work with large taxpayers in Lviv.
And so today, from July 12, 2022, 32-year-old Serhiy Lyseyuk is the deputy head of the Main Directorate of the DPS in the Volyn region, who two weeks after his appointment became at. head of the Main Directorate of the DPS in the Volyn region.
How Serhiy Lyseyuk received apartments and cars for free as a tax officer
And as it regularly happens in our country, the appointment to a leading state position immediately significantly improves the life of an employee. Even if his official salary is a couple of tens of thousands of hryvnias. But it's not about the salary, but about the possibilities of influence and "left" earnings thanks to the position.
According to Serhiy Liseyuk's declarations, before he was appointed head of the Volyn tax office, he earned very modest money - from 2 to 8 thousand dollars a year. Therefore, he did not manage to accumulate any savings during the years of public service.
As well as own housing. While working in the Rivne and Kyiv regions, Lyseyuk had to live somewhere, but all those years he did not indicate any housing in the declarations, thus violating the anti-corruption legislation - rent or free use of housing must also be declared.
In 2017, Lyseyuk indicated in his declaration his mother's house in the village of Lyshche, Lutsk district, although he worked at the university in Irpin that year. He could not go to work and home across half the country, so he again provided unreliable information about where he lived. Usually, housing rent is not included in the declarations, so as not to show expenses, which often end up exceeding official incomes. Why demonstrate once again that civil servants in Ukraine do not live on a salary. Most likely, Lyseyuk was guided by this logic.
But in the declarations for 2018, 2019 and 2020, Serhii Lyseyuk finally had an apartment of 49.6 square meters in the city of Irpin. But not his own, and not even rented, but given to him for free use by 28-year-old citizen Yuriy Pypka. According to open data, it is known that Yuriy Pypka rented out a two-room apartment in the residential complex "Irpin Residence", located in the city of Irpin at 78 Sadova Street - across the street from the University of the SFS of Ukraine, where Serhiy Lyseyuk worked at the time.
For what merits and preferences did a person who rents out an apartment for 8.5 thousand hryvnias per month give it to the taxman Lyseyuk for nothing? And maybe not for nothing, but for money, and it was documented as free use for the declaration. So that there are no questions, what does a person who spends 8.5 thousand hryvnias per month on an apartment with a salary of 15 thousand hryvnias live for? In any case, again — either an unreliable declaration, or a question about an illegal benefit for a civil servant in the form of providing him with an apartment for free use.
But not the only apartment. Young taxman Lyseyuk also received a 2011 Volkswagen Touareg car from citizen Andriy Matyashchuk for free use. Again, what is it? Bribery, concealment of real costs or something else?
In 2021, Lyseyuk worked in Lviv. And in the declaration, this time he indicated that he rented an apartment of 42.9 square meters and a parking space from the owner of Hychka Nataliya Yuriivna, but… he did not indicate the cost of this rent. According to Osint Global, Lyseyuk rented this apartment in the Parus Park residential complex at 64a Kulparkivska Street in Lviv, where the average cost of renting housing and parking spaces in 2021 was from UAH 108,000 and UAH 42,000 per year, respectively. That is, renting an apartment and a parking space for a year together cost from UAH 150,000 per year. And Lyseyuk again hid this information from anti-corruption bodies and society.
How free land near Kyiv brought Serhiy Lysiuk more than a million
In May 2021, Lyseyuk received a plot of land (cadastral number 3221083500:03:003:0627) with an area of 1,200 square meters in the village of Kozyntsi near Kyiv for free from the Irpin city council under the signature of the corrupt mayor Oleksandr Markushin.
Two years later, according to Lyseyuk's declaration, he sold this plot of land for 1 million 48 thousand hryvnias, or 29 thousand 910 dollars, to citizen Oleksandr Honcharov. But it is worth noting that the sale of similar plots of land in this area, far from the infrastructure of the village, is carried out at a price of up to 4,000 USD. The agreement at a price 7 times higher than the market price is very similar to a fictitious one, the purpose of which is to legalize funds of unknown origin.
With whom Serhiy Lysiuk organized a car smuggling scheme in Volyn
And now it will become clear where these funds come from. At the beginning of his career, Serhiy Lyseyuk met Taras Tsybulin, who, at that time, in 2012, was the head of the tax police department of the Lutsk ODPI of the Mindohodiv GU in the Volyn region, i.e., he was Lyseyuk's chief. Cibulin, as noted in journalistic investigations, then introduced his colleague to such a profitable business as control over the trade in counterfeit cigarettes and vodka. In the process, they found Mykhailo Smolka, an entrepreneur, a well-known smuggler and converter, who is currently included in the NSDC sanctions list. Together with him, Lyseyuk and Tsybulin began to jointly establish the shadow production and sale of vodka.
In 2016, both Lyseyuk and Tsybulin were transferred to work in the internal security of the Department of the Federal Tax Service in the Rivne region, where they took control of the trade in fictitious VAT and customs clearance of imported cars at an undervalued price. Following them, Mykhailo Smolka entered the Rivne region with his importers. From then until today, they started smuggling cars together.
The scheme consisted in the fact that commercial firms brought passenger cars to the territory of Ukraine, which were sold to individuals, and the documents on the sale of which were drawn up at the LLC as spare parts for trucks. The scheme involved Spetstechzakhid LLC and Trading Company Naftoresurs LLC, which later entered into fictitious agreements on the provision of transport services for Belavtodor-Ukraine LLC, as well as Zahid Leader Trade LLC and Ukrtehavtoservice LLC, owned by Natalya Tsybuliniy, wife of Taras Tsybulin, friend, colleague and partner of the chief tax officer of Volyn Serhiy Lyseyuk.
The following eloquent fact is a confirmation that all this happened under cover and with the direct participation of the taxman Lyseyuk. Do you remember the 2011 Volkswagen Touareg that appeared in Serhiy Lyseyuk's declaration in 2018 and which some Andriy Matyashchuk allegedly gave him for free use? Andriy Vasylyovych Matyashchuk is the brother of Tsybulina Natalya Vasylivna, they are both registered at the same address in Lutsk, str. Stefanyka, building 11, sq. 2. Two of Tsybulina's companies, which were involved in the corruption scheme for the smuggling of cars, were registered at the same address.
It is not at all excluded that the Toyota Camry, in which Serhiy Lyseyuk was involved in an accident in Kyiv, was also imported under this smuggling scheme.
Participants of the smuggling octopus of Volyn chief tax officer Serhiy Lyseyuk
With the beginning of the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation into Ukraine, the Lyseyuk-Tsybulin-Smolka group continued to smuggle cars into Ukraine, but now under the guise of humanitarian aid for the military. So, in April 2022, employees of the Bureau of Economic Security discovered at least 64 cars that were suspiciously imported through Volyn checkpoints - they were supposed to be humanitarian aid for the Armed Forces, but for some reason remained in Volyn.
For example, an armored Audi supposedly went to the front, but only reached the village of Pidgaitsi in the Lutsk district. It was here that Mykhailo Smolka, not lost at the beginning of the war, created the territorial defense battalion "Strumivka", which received an Audi from the public organization "Association of Transporters and Importers of Vehicles", to which, judging by Smolka's Facebook page, he has a direct relationship . In short, he brought humanitarian aid to himself.
Things went so well that in the summer of 2022, one of the members of the criminal group, Serhii Lyseyuk, was appointed head of the Volyn tax office.
"For the past two weeks (before the appointment of Lyseyuk), he (Mykhailo Smolka) and his representatives visited importers of the Volyn region with an offer to purchase VAT limits from them for 2.5%, while guaranteeing full security and assistance of the future head of Volyn tax, Serhiy Lyseyuk ", says the publication of the Antikor portal.
But, fortunately, the activities of Mykhailo Smolka, Serhiy Lyseyuk and Taras Tsybulin did not go unnoticed by law enforcement officers. Today, all three of them are involved in the criminal proceedings of the State Bureau of Investigation on the fact of creating an organized group that implemented schemes to minimize tax liabilities and generate illegal tax credit.
As reported by the local publication "Volynskii Novyni", in June 2023, detectives of the SBI even conducted searches in the regional tax office and at the "Lutsk" customs post. Mykhailo Smolka was suspected of VAT evasion, and Serhiy Lyseyuk was suspected of turning a blind eye to it. Investigators believe that Smolka conducted non-commodity operations under the nose of the tax office to provide freight transportation and auto parts services to enterprises, while the head of the tax office Lyseyuk received financial benefits from the entrepreneur through his intermediaries - tax officials Taras Tsybulin and Volodymyr Poberezhny.
In other words, a kind of smuggling and tax octopus was formed in Volyn, the center of which was acting head of the tax service of the Volyn region, Serhii Lyseyuk. How long this will not be noticed in Kyiv and how long Lyseyuk will remain in his position with impunity is a rhetorical question.