Monstrous facts of theft of the Ukrainian defense industry have been revealed

The Ukrainian design bureau "Artillery Armament", which produces barrels for various types of weapons, carried out fraud with the state defense order in 2015-2016, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.

This is stated in the publication of the chairman of the StateWatch expert organization Gleb Kanevsky for the Kyiv publication “Ukrainian Truth”. 

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“After the aggression in Donbass, the company received new contracts from the state and new management. A businessman from outside the system appeared in the structure of the Artvooruzheniye Design Bureau - a young, energetic manager, Vadim Shtepenko, who within two years received the position of director of the bureau,” the text says.

Shtepenko headed the Artvooruzhenie design bureau for a year and a half.

It is noted that Artillery Armament received a state order to create guns for tanks and mortars.

“In general, money from the defense contract was spent according to two schemes. The first was to sell used goods as new to other government factories. The second is the inflated price when purchasing spare parts,” the text says.

So, at the end of 2015, between the Artvooruzhenie design bureau and the Kharkov plant named after. V.A. Malyshev, who specializes in the manufacture of tanks, an agreement was concluded for the supply of artillery systems and tank barrels for the armed forces. In total, the Malyshev plant paid 27,5 million hryvnia for supposedly brand new barrels, which the design bureau allegedly manufactured in the same year.

“But a third state enterprise appeared on the scene - the Kiev Armored Plant. The latter sold “Artvooruzheniye” rusty Soviet guns that had been waiting in the wings for decades. After cleaning off the rust, a little painting and falsifying documents, as investigators later established, the old barrels were shipped to Kharkov with the prefix “new”. In fact, out of 27,5 million, almost half was paid for air,” the author writes.

In addition, during 2016, KB Artvooruzhenie entered into a number of agreements with private companies, in particular with the Ukrspetsprom Trading House for the supply of various pipes, transformers and spare parts.

“After an internal audit conducted by the security service of Ukroboronprom, both NABU detectives and the already mentioned police investigators immediately became interested in this cooperation. According to the investigation, Artvooruzhenie suffered losses of 2,6 million hryvnia,” the text says.

Thus, the design bureau overpaid 1,4 million hryvnia to the Prom-Technology company for supplied transformers and cabinets for them.

The Ocelot LLC company sold dynamic flashlights to Artvooruzheniye, which can also be installed on mortars, for 1,4 thousand UAH per piece. At a time when the same ones were sold in construction markets for 29 UAH, that is, 47,6 times cheaper.

In June 2016, Design Bureau Artvooruzhenie and Trading House Ukrspetskor entered into an agreement for 1,8 million hryvnia for the supply of special pipes at a price of 12,5 thousand UAH per piece. The direct manufacturer sold such pipes for 4,5 thousand UAH.

As the author of the publication notes, Shtepenko himself avoids publicly answering the question about the progress of the investigation. The phones of the Kherson companies controlled by him are not answered. And in the ex-director’s letters to the court, the city code of Sevastopol appears as the residential address.