Imagine a simple scheme: first, an internal document appears that is not even evidence in court. Then, based on it, a detective writes a report. Next — registration in the Unified Register of Pre-trial Investigations, a search, blocked accounts, people in balaclavas in your office. And only somewhere at the end of this chain, perhaps a court will establish whether there was a violation at all. This is not a hypothetical scenario — this is a documented practice of the Bureau of Economic Security that an entire civil aviation industry is now experiencing.
Ukraine needs nearly 600 billion dollars for reconstruction, and the lion's share of this amount should come from private investors, not donors. But an investor does not read the Criminal Procedure Code. He sees news: a company was raided. It doesn't matter to him whether it's the BEB, DBR or SBU — what matters is that the business became the subject of criminal prosecution, and therefore is risky.
A document that is not on the list of evidence
Andriy Ishchyk, a lawyer at LCF Legal Group, explains the mechanism very specifically: a BEB analyst processes electronic databases, calculates probable budget losses — and this document in itself establishes nothing. Yet it becomes the trigger for blocking accounts and searches.
The Criminal Procedure Code clearly defines what constitutes evidence: testimony, physical evidence, documents, expert conclusions. BEB's analytical product is not on this list — by its nature, it is closer to a specialist's conclusion, which is not evidence in criminal proceedings. According to Ishchyk, this position has already been supported by the Cassation Criminal Court.
The logic should work like this: first, a tax violation is established, then — if there is intent — criminal liability. In practice, the sequence is often reversed.
Five airlines and one inspection with violations
The most striking example is the aviation industry. The BEB is investigating cases against at least five carriers, including MAU, Konstanti, Urgy, N3Operations and Skyline, believing they should have paid an additional 15% tax on lease payments for aircraft and helicopters, equating these payments to royalties.
Here is the paradox: according to the State Tax Service, airlines underwent tax inspections, and only in one case out of all was a violation established. Victoria Kasyan, Deputy Director of the Transfer Pricing Department of the State Tax Service, confirmed this directly — the reclassification of leasing to royalties was made based on the results of "only one inspection".
This did not prevent opening criminal cases against other companies with recalculations for seven years of operation. At the same time, aircraft leasing is standard practice for about 40 Ukrainian carriers, so the list of suspects could expand virtually endlessly.
"A foreign fund does not understand what the name of that law enforcement agency is that put the company's face on the floor and conducts raids. It sees one thing: so there is terrible crime there. No one cares whether there will be a verdict or not — they won't invest money in this sphere anymore," explains Yaroslav Zheleznyak, First Deputy Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Finance.
Where is the line between mistake and crime
A key legal detail often ignored in public discussion: to establish criminal liability for tax evasion, it is not enough to simply announce the amount unpaid. One must prove intent — that a person knew of a specific obligation and deliberately failed to fulfill it.
A disputed interpretation of a norm or a different understanding of the legal nature of an operation — that is not evasion. And in the leasing case, it is precisely about interpretation: investigators treat aircraft as "equipment" rather than vehicles, ignoring international conventions on avoiding double taxation, which have priority over national law and which Ukraine itself ratified.
Tax legislation regarding leasing has not changed for decades. The question is: why have five criminal cases suddenly accumulated on the same topic, "written from the same template" after the publication of one article by the State Tax Service team in 2024?
What this means for everyone who counts money
Almost one in five complaints to the Business Ombudsman Council today concerns unjustified actions of law enforcement — these are no longer isolated cases but systemic statistics.
For airlines that will need new aircraft after the opening of the sky, lessors and foreign capital, this is not an abstract issue. A lessor considering a deal with a Ukrainian carrier must now factor in the risk: even a successfully passed tax inspection does not guarantee protection from a criminal case based on internal analytics.
If the BEB continues to use analytical reports as the actual basis for raids without first establishing a tax obligation through an agreed tax notice-decision, every industry with international counterparties — from agriculture to IT — risks repeating the fate of air carriers. The question is not whether the system has the authority to investigate economic crimes, but whether it is ready to prove intent before, not after, the raid.
