Looking at the Lipetsk Confectionary Factory's official data, published on the website of AK&M, responsible for the release of public information in the Russian securities market, Ukrainian blogger Oleksiy Romanov found that as of June 30, 2015, the company's shares are 99.9319 percent owned by LLC 'Central European Confectionary Company, located in Kiev. Ukraine's Register of Legal Entities reveals that this company's major stakeholders are the closed investment fund Prime Assets Capital and closed investment fund KonditerInvest, with the final beneficiary (i.e. owner of the LLC) listed as none other than Poroshenko, Petro Alexeyevich. "I have heard this name somewhere. Have you?" Romanov joked.
The factory's 'Cash Flow Statement 2014' shows that the Lipetsk Confectionary Factory paid 1,110,000 rubles in profit taxes, 82,372,000 rubles in property taxes, and 5,506,000 rubles in other taxes in 2014. "In other words," the blogger notes, taking account of VAT taxes, "the Lipetsk Confectionary Factory, belonging to Mr. Poroshenko, paid into the budget of the Russian Federation a total of about 100 million rubles –that is about $2-3 million dollars US" (accounting for the exchange rate at the time).
Romanov concluded that "the moral of the story is that open registries on the various types of ownership are a good thing; they have helped to find this information. And with this type of information in mind, Poroshenko's announcements about 'intelligence reporting about a possible invasion of Ukraine' sound a bit differently, don't you think?"
The sale of Roshen has turned into a sticky political situation for Poroshenko, who has repeatedly failed to live up to his promises to sell the company, which produces about 450,000 metric tons of confectionary goods and has factories and other assets in Ukraine, Russia, Lithuania and Hungary.
