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An ex-tax collector with dubious baggage: why Hennadii Mazur became interested in the fate of fish in the Ladyzhyn reservoir

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Why Hennadii Mazur became interested in the fate of fish in the Ladyzhyn Reservoir

Hennadiy Mazur is one of the members of the Vinnytsia Regional Council's working group, which was created by former Prime Minister Groysman's associates to formally find out the causes of the fish death in one of the lakes of the Ladyzhyn reservoir, UNN reports.

Gennadiy Mazur is a tax officer with a solid background, so to speak. He started in 1995 as an ordinary senior tax inspector and within seven years rose to become the head of the State Tax Administration of Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, which he headed in 2002-2003.

Formally, he resigned of his own free will, but according to , the "desire" was dictated by the fact that Mazur was suspected of abuse of office.

For several years, Mazur stayed in the shadows, heading an agricultural enterprise in his native Trostianets district in Vinnytsia region, and in 2007 he returned to the tax authorities.

In 2013, when Mazur was the deputy head of the Vinnytsia Oblast Tax Service, a high-profile scandal erupted: the Security Service of Ukraine conducted searches in his office and in the apartments he owned.

The case concerned the importation of cheap Turkish gold to Ukraine and its further sale under the guise of Ukrainian-made jewelry. 

According to the investigation, in Ladyzhyn, a group of jewelry entrepreneurs, along with gold products of their own production, stamped gold jewelry of Turkish origin smuggled into Ukraine. For five years (from 2007 to 2012), they stamped more than a ton of gold jewelry made in Turkey at the Vinnytsia branch of the Central State Assay Control Enterprise, along with a small part of their own gold products.

As a result, about seven million hryvnias in taxes were not paid to the Ukrainian budget.

One of the pieces of evidence in the case was a notebook allegedly found in Mazur's office. At the time, law enforcement officers claimed that it contained monthly reports on business transactions with precious metals with personal signatures under each, as well as financial calculations for several years. Based on these records, the special service officers concluded that "the tax officer personally controlled the process and coordinated the actions of entrepreneurs aimed at tax evasion.

One of the defendants in the case was Hennadii Mazur's wife, Taisiia Mazur, who at the time was the owner of the Podilska Jewelry Company.

The firm Charm, run by Olena Honta, was suspected of the "magical" transformation of Turkish gold into Ukrainian gold.

At the time, Ms. Olena herself did not hide her relationship with Taisiya Mazur. But clarifiedthat they were purely business: they said that the Charm company rented equipment from the Podil Jewelry Company.

The case was never brought to any logical conclusion. Mazur left the tax office and immediately found a job as an assistant to Mykola Dzhyga, a member of the Party of Regions and former head of the Vinnytsia Regional State Administration.

In 2020, the story of the B2B Jewelry pyramid scheme made headlines all over Ukraine and beyond. People who remember were offered to buy jewelry with the possibility of receiving cashback that exceeded their cost, as well as to invest in money certificates at huge interest rates.

The organization started its activities in 2018 in Vinnytsia region. The following year, it was active not only throughout Ukraine but also in Russia and Kazakhstan. In 2020, the SBU became interested in B2B Jewelry's activities.

According to the intelligence service, more than 600,000 people were investors in the pyramid scheme, and the estimated amount of misappropriated and legalized funds was more than $250 million.

The head of B2B Jewelry was Mykola Honta, the husband of Olena Honta, who had already been named.

At the same time, some media outlets suggestedthat Gennadiy Mazur could have been involved in the activities of the jewelry pyramid scheme. But this was not proved.

Recently, Mazur himself has been trying to position himself exclusively as a scholar. Vinnytsia Academy of Continuing Education, a municipal higher education institution.

Although there are nuances here as well.

On the website of the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, journalists managed to find and download the text of the abstract of Hennadii Mazur's dissertation "Socio-economic problems of rural development and ways to solve them (regional aspect)".

Using the well-known anti-plagiarism service StrikePlagiarism.com, we managed to check the uniqueness of the text. And it turned outthat the text is 77.52% similar to the one posted on samzan.net, which is a popular platform for collecting orders for writing student and research papers on a turnkey basis.

Let's not forget that Mazur is also a member of the Vinnytsia Regional Council from Batkivshchyna. The faction of this party is a satellite of Groysman's Ukrainian Strategy, which has a majority in the regional council.

Mazur himself is called an informal curator of the Bershad, Ladyzhyn, and Trostianets communities, where he tries to influence all political and other processes as much as possible. 

In fact, this can explain why Mazur was included in the aforementioned working group on fish.

And there is a suspicion that he is not interested in the cause of her death at all, but only in strengthening his political influence.

Zakhar Podkidyshev

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