Within a few days of each other, the heads of two key parliamentary committees - budgetary and financial - outlined one of the main problems of the country’s economy and immediately found a solution to it.
Head of the Budget Committee Roksolana Pidlasa: “There is a hole of 400-500 billion hryvnia in the Ukrainian budget for 2024.”
Head of the Financial Committee Daniil Getmantsev: “Thanks to shadowization, Ukraine can additionally receive up to 500 billion a year.”
Everything turns out to be simple.
The issue of additional financing for mobilization, providing fighters with weapons and corresponding payments lies not in increasing fiscal pressure on those who pay taxes and work “in the white”, but in bringing out of the shadows those who do not pay them at all.
And the scale of the problem is amazing.
Deputy Prime Minister Yulia Sviridenko said that the shadow economy accounts for 40% of the country’s economy.
The question logically arises: how, in conditions of martial law, the complete monopoly of the state on force, the right to any decisions and radical actions, the authorities cannot and do not want to turn the shadow into the bright side.
Let’s be frank that Ukrainians are interested in the topic of the shadow economy only in those moments when the news shows a Volyn customs cashier carrying $700 thousand in cash to Kyiv.
Or when journalists show the luxurious life of ex-Deputy Prosecutor General Verbitsky, who was responsible for the fight against the same shadow economy.
At such moments, Ukrainians are indignant and demand fair punishment for the defendants, but not everyone can connect these episodes with their purchase, for example, of mobile phones without issuing a receipt or cheap cigarettes.
But this connection is direct.
For example, I recently analyzed the Apple market in Ukraine and found out that 75% of iPhones are smuggled and sold without paying taxes.
With 241,000 iPhones officially imported, 950,000 new devices were registered online.
Where are they from?
Obviously contraband.
The Yabko store directly confirmed this, saying that they transport phones past customs.
Everything is like in the joke:
- What do you do for a living?
⁃ I steal from the budget.
⁃ What if someone finds out?
⁃ Well, you found out, so what?”
And there are dozens of such networks that operate according to the same model.
But they are no longer in the basements of high-rise buildings, but in TOP places in shopping centers, on Independence Square and even opposite the tax office.
Nobody is hiding.
The sale of illegal equipment has become the norm and is actively developing.
For example, the YABLUKA chain already has 96 stores throughout the country. And neither the tax service nor the ESB notices them, and yet the budget losses from the illegal Apple market are commensurate with the losses from the illegal cigarette market. 23–25 billion UAH. in year.
Yes, the authorities and security forces imitate the reaction, take part in round tables and promise to overcome the problem, but no real steps are yet visible. Instead of quick action, there is only a statement of the problem and hints at raising taxes for those who pay them.
Tax office and BEB, if you can’t do it yourself, maybe let’s go together to illegal Apple stores and I’ll show you where the war taxes are?
And this is one of the stores selling smuggled Apple in the YABLUKA network, on the corner of Shota Rustaveli and Basseynaya.
Is it really beautiful and large-scale?
Can you imagine how much commercial real estate rent costs on these streets?
And all this, without exaggeration, actually exists and develops on taxes stolen from the army.