ISTANBUL: While Russia and Turkey are busy restoring bilateral cooperation at the highest level, some unscrupulous entrepreneurs ruin the picture of achievements in this area by taking advantage of the readiness of the Russian side to provide favourable conditions for their activities in Russia. Turkey-based company Palmali, the child of Turkish and Azerbaijani entrepreneur Mubariz Mansimov, has received a lot of media attention recently.
“By and large, we see a coherent and purposeful system of long-term dubious combinations. Instead of the amount of $44.8 million that the Turkish company was supposed to pay in the form of a profit tax, the company “blessed” the Russian budget with the sum of $1.222 million,” the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper wrote about the company.
The story started in 2013, when Russian tax inspectors were checking Palmali LLC, a part of the Turkish group, which was established in Rostov-on-Don in 2000. As a result of the inspection, the Southern Investigation Department on Transport of the Investigative Committee of Russia instituted a criminal case in early 2016 against the director of the company, Alexei Mikhelev, under clause “b” of Part 2 of Art. 199 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“Evasion from paying taxes in an especially large amount”). The amount in question exceeded 1 billion 282 million rubles.
Investigators claimed that Mikhelev “submitted to the Tax Inspectorate Office of the Leninsky District of the city of Rostov-on-Don tax returns on the profit tax for 2010 and 2011, in which he deliberately included false and understated information on the amount of profit that the company had received from activities to transport cargoes by water in 2010-2011 and the amount of corporate income tax payable to the budget for 2010 and 2011,” a report from the Investigative Committee said.
