April 12 2005, 14:27 Interfax

Territory of Ukraine was used for smuggling meat to Russia

Russia's Federal Service for Veterinary and Phyto-Sanitary Control (Rosselkhoznadzor) and Ukraine's State Department of Veterinary Medicine have revealed numerous facts of using the territory of Ukraine for re-exports (illegal transits) of meat to Russia from third countries, the Head of Rosselkhoznadzor Sergey Dankvert has said to Interfax news agency.

"In the last six months we have strengthened control over meat supplies through Ukraine. For this purpose we sent to our Ukrainian colleagues the list of orders of supplying companies for meat supplies from Ukraine and asked them to confirm the concluded contracts", Dankvert said. "We did it because we had suspicions that the territory of Ukraine had been used for re-exports of meat from other countries", he said.

The recently obtained reply from the Head of Ukraine's Veterinary Department Petro Verbytsky has proved these suspicions at full measure. Many contracts for supplies of a few hundreds thousands tonnes of meat, allegedly concluded with Ukrainian producers, appeared to be faked. In particular, some meat processing plants in Chernovsty, Zhitomir, Cherkassy and Lvov Oblasts replied that they had not concluded the contracts that Rosselkhoznadzor was asking to confirm and had not intended to supply meat to Russian Federation. Some contracts were concluded with companies which either were not registered at the addresses, stated in the contracts, or do not produce meat at all.

Thus, with reference to the letter from Petro Verbytsky, Dankvert stated that Ukrainian companies at the moment did not have such amount of meat, as was indicated in the contracts. Consequently, that meant that the territory of Ukraine has been used for re-exports, first of all, because supplies from this country are not limited with quotas and not charged with duties.

He said his authority was going to stop the illegal practice and to render the whole thing to law-enforcement bodies for investigation.