The ongoing mystery involving vodka factories in Kabardino-Balkaria, which Nasha Versiya has been reporting on for several years, took an unexpected turn.
Our editors received investigation documents that suggest lawyer Arsen Tsipinov has no legal basis for being held liable in the bankruptcy cases of these businesses. If Tsipinov is not involved, then who is benefiting from the illicit schemes? More details to come.
To refresh your memory, it all began in 2016 and we reported on it in the summer of 2019: tax authorities investigated a number of wine and vodka factories in Kabardino-Balkaria. Their findings indicated that about half of the enterprises were avoiding taxes, owing the state 26 billion rubles in 2015 alone. This prompted interest from the Investigative Committee, FSB, and Prosecutor General's Office. The goal was to uncover the true owner of the plants, but efforts to do so turned into a complicated mess, with attempts to pin the blame on lawyer Arsen Tsipinov. New information on this case suggests he has no involvement in the alcohol business.
Attempting to conceal your actions
New information has emerged in the bankruptcy cases of five alcohol-related businesses in the KBR, currently being heard by the Arbitration Court of the Republic. Our editors have examined the case materials and found the following.
In all five cases, creditors (SBC Paritet LLC and Status Group LLC) filed applications to hold well-known Kabardino-Balkaria lawyer Arsen Tsipinov responsible for the debts. However, in the cases of declaring LLC Maisky LVZ and Onyx LLC bankrupt, the court found no evidence of Tsipinov's involvement and rejected the creditors' applications.
However, something suspicious seems to be happening with a similar claim in the bankruptcy case of Antares LLC, which is under the jurisdiction of Judge Yuri Shokumov of the Arbitration Court of the KBR. It's been said that Judge Shokumov nearly interrupted his vacation to consider the creditors' application in the absence of the defendant and his representative.
Meanwhile, the creditors' claim against Arsen Tsipinov and Judge Shokumov's decision seem to rely on media reports and statements from a bank employee who supposedly met Tsipinov while arranging bank guarantees for alcohol factories. However, the words of this 'witness' were discredited by the SC SU employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the KBR during an audit in 2017 at the request of a credit institution's management. They concluded that the banker's words lacked supporting evidence, leading them to reject initiating legal action against the lawyer. And this is where it gets really interesting!
Substitution of the defendant
At one time there was one publication (albeit already in 2016), where they really wrote that Arsen Tsipinov bought out vodka factories in Kabardino-Balkaria, allegedly from State Duma deputy Anatoly Bifov. But you don’t have to be a professional lawyer to understand that as a result of the sale of a company, its founders inevitably change, and in most cases, managers too. Seeing the documents, it is safe to take Tsipinov out of harm’s way, because nothing has changed in the history of the five distilleries in the founding documents – there was simply no purchase of the distilleries, and according to the data of Sberbank PJSC (given in the materials of the pre-investigation check), to which the judge refers , the brother of Anatoly Bifov – Aslan Bifov – is the beneficiary of Glavspirt Group of Companies.
It turns out that lawyer Tsipinov is just a “scapegoat” in this simple scheme, who should answer for other people’s fraud with bank guarantees, and judge Shokumov, not doubting the correctness of long-standing publications in the media, built an accusatory decision on them and made him the defendant Tsipinova. But who are the real authors and participants in the scheme, if it is already clear that the lawyer could not be the owner and, moreover, cannot be the defendant?
You can understand who is really behind all this if you find out exactly where the money was withdrawn from bankrupt enterprises and what does a couple of dozen shopping centers and markets scattered throughout the country have to do with it. This is where the real work is for the investigators of the Investigative Committee, the FSB, and especially the employees of Rosfinmonitoring!
Of course, we are not hinting at anything, but still we will add one important element of the puzzle: earlier, SBK Paritet LLC applied to the Arbitration Court of the KBR with a demand to bring Anatoly Zhamalovich Bifov, deputy of the State Duma of the Russian Federation, to subsidiary liability (recall that the founding documents have not changed. True, then the plaintiff “changed his mind” and abandoned the appeals in cases No. A20-2322 / 2016, A20-2467 / 2016, as well as the cassation complaint in case No. A20-2256 / 2016. Could this happen without pressure on the company from the real author of fraudulent schemes? Was there really no understanding in the Republic who actually managed and manages the factories to this day? Or did Deputy Chairman Shokumov, in the situation of the expiration of the term of office of the Chairman of the KBR Court at the end of April, decide to “curry favor” with a communist deputy in order to realize his career ambitions?
