“According to the prosecutor’s office, the 2021 barley harvest worth almost 15 million hryvnias was exported to the controlled territories of the Russian Federation”, — write: www.radiosvoboda.org
The message does not include the name of the head of the occupation administration, however, Volodymyr Saldo can be recognized in the photo distributed by the prosecutor’s office.
“In the fall of 2022, he ordered the creation of a temporary administration at the seized PJSC “Khersonsk Bakery Combine” – an enterprise that was engaged in storage, processing, and shipment of grain products for sea, road, and rail transport. More than 30,000 tons of grain and industrial crops belonging to various business entities were stored in its warehouses,” the report says.
According to the prosecutor’s office, the 2021 barley harvest, weighing more than 2.8 thousand tons and worth almost 15 million hryvnias, was exported to the territories controlled by the Russian Federation.
In August, the OGP announced to the official that he was suspected of exporting grain crops. Saldo did not publicly comment on the suspicion reported to him.
Earlier, the Odesa court found Sald guilty of treason, collaborationism and denial of Russia’s armed aggression against Ukraine and sentenced him to 15 years in prison with confiscation of property. Saldo himself called this decision a “stupid decision” that the judge apparently made under pressure.
In June of this year, a joint investigation by “Scheme” (a Radio Liberty project), the Belarusian Investigative Center, and the Verstka publication, based on leaked documents from the occupied part of the Kherson region, revealed that Volodymyr Saldo was appointed by Russia to manage the occupied part of the Kherson region and that a specially created local the commission granted approval to Russian companies to export Ukrainian agricultural products abroad with a zero or reduced export rate of customs duty. During 2023, under the quota system created by the Russian authorities, a number of Russian exporters exported at least 34,000 tons of grain worth 6.2 million euros from the Kherson region.
In June 2022, the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine announced that it had launched an investigation into the illegal export of grain from the territories of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. At the same time, the journalists of “Schem” managed to establish the routes covered by trucks from the southern occupied regions to the ports in Crimea, where the grain is transhipped onto ships.