Ukrlandfarming Group's Address to the President of Ukraine Concerning NABU's Attempts to Interrogate Company's 10,000 Employees With No Legal Grounds

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Dear Mr. President!

We want to address you on behalf of Ukrlandfаrming and Avangard companies. We face a situation which once again proves that the NABU detectives are violating the law and are not interested in an objective approach to the case related to our company shareholder Oleg Bakhmatyuk. Moreover, they continue to harass business structures employing a large number of people. And we believe that their actions are aimed primarily at disrupting the sowing campaign in one of the largest agricultural holdings in Ukraine. The main reason is the personal revenge of Artem Sytnyk, who has recently been taken on the register of corrupt officials.

January 15 this year, Semivolos and Koval, detectives of the Kharkiv NABU Branch without sanction interviewed people in Tokari village, in the Lokhvytskyy district of Poltava region. By misleading, manipulating and not informing them, against legislation in power, about their legal options to protect themselves, and having no procedural documents, they sought explanations regarding confidential information, namely wages. 
We understand that these actions were taken to disrupt the enterprise functioning through direct unlawful pressure on its employees.

The following day, the detectives appeared at the Lokhvitsky Sugar Factory in Zavodske, and declared in the director's office that they were to interview 10,000 people about their salaries, having neither legal nor procedural grounds or documents.

Our understanding is pretty clear that these detectives' actions are aimed not at combating corruption, but at destabilizing a company of about 30,000 people, sowing confusion among them, intimidating them and hence disrupting the seedage in preparation.

We absolutely do not understand how such actions relate to the criminal case against Oleg Bakhmatyuk and VAB Bank. We see that the NABU head, Mr. Sytnyk, having been found corrupt by court, does not comply with any legal norms in his personal revenge.

We urge both Mr. Sytnyk and the prosecuting authorities to pay attention to this matter. We will not sit back and look at these people actually destroying the enterprise and manipulating the minds of society, intimidating Ukrlandfarming employees, and making the production process impossible.

Once again, we would like to remind Mr. Sytnik and his subordinates, who are major recipients of budgetary allocations, that Ukrlandfаrming and Avangard, employing 27,000 people, produce 1% of the country's GDP a year, pay 3 billion hryvnas in salaries and 2.5 billion in taxes of all levels, of which, by the way, the PR agency called NABU is funded as well. And the people now being with such an ease interviewed by the detectives are then to take care of chickens, livestock, and prepare their equipment for sowing. And detectives who create nothing and live off budget allocations are actually destroying what is generating revenue in the state. We do not understand these people's logic.

We are addressing to all the authorities, the President, the Prime Minister of Ukraine, the Prosecutor General, although we know that he is absolutely reluctant to hear us: do not allow one person, blinded by the desire for revenge, to go so far as to destroy the company employing tens of thousands of people.

If the company Ukrlandfarming is pressed further, we will take public steps. Of course, we have no army, no soldiers, no other capabilities available in the security forces. We will have to ask people to come out to streets to protest - instead of farming and benefiting their families and the state. The only thing they will require is the preservation of their jobs, which the corrupt Artem Sytnik wants to take away from them.

Once again we say: Shame on you, Mr. Sytnik, stop your blind revenge! Your being a corrupt person is not our fault! Do not force your subordinates to break the law, because they will be held to answer sooner or later. But we will not let getting them liable on the debris of our company.