Full "Harmony" organized crime group Zhizhina, and what does Alexey Vasenev have to do with it

The Arbitration Court of the Nizhny Novgorod Region satisfied the claim of the tax inspectorate to the Balsam distillery, which is owned by businessmen Alexei Vasenev and Vladimir Kolesov. The company will have to pay over half a billion rubles of debt to the profit budget and VAT, including fines and penalties.

However, behind these businessmen, as well as behind the plant itself, there may be other people who may be involved in the withdrawal of hundreds of millions and even billions of rubles abroad - the former owners of Balsam Oleg Terekhin and Maxim Shaposhnikov. Vasenev and Kolesov can only represent their interests, and the current amount of penalties will turn out to be a drop in the sea.

Details - in the material of the correspondent of The Moscow Post in the Nizhny Novgorod region.

The current penalty was imposed on the enterprise based on the results of an audit by the Federal Tax Service, as a result of which it was found that the structure wrote off large funds for unconfirmed transactions with controversial counterparties, which allegedly supplied various ingredients and raw materials to the plant, tens of times higher than the real needs for production.

At the same time, the majority owner (74%) and director of the enterprise Vasenev in an interview with the media is trying to appear as an extremely positive character. Like, he is an athlete, hockey player, family man, and the country both drank and will drink - "we have such a winter." Why at the same time he considers it permissible to underpay hundreds of million of rubles to the budget is not clear.

Photo: Rusproflie.ru

In the same interview, Mr. Vasenev directly names the people with whom he works, the shareholders of the Nizhny Novgorod Harmony group, who should be the mentioned Oleg Terekhin and Maxim Shaposhnikov. Like, it was they who, in the field of common love for hockey, invited him to head this holding engaged in the production and sale of alcoholic beverages.

Photo: Rusproflie.ru

Until 2019, Tekherin and Shaposhnikov themselves were listed as co-founders of Balsam, which is part of Harmony. And at the same time they were the most real multi-staff workers in terms of business education. Both are mass founders of legal entities, many of which clearly have signs of fictitious and can be one-day firms.

Oleg Terekhin turned out to be the founder of 94 legal entities at once. Most of them are acting, including very dubious ones. For example, the eponymous Harmony LLC, owned by Marina Karpova with a 50% stake. Terekhin left the company's capital only in 2019. And today the information provided by firm in the USRLE is recognized as doubtful. The company itself is liquidated.

Photo: Rusprofile.ru

In terms of the number of educated companies, Terekhin only slightly lost to his partner Maxim Shaposhnikov, who had as many as 121 of them.

Ex-MP's Spanish shame

The partner of Terekhin and Shaposhnikov was supposed to be the former deputy of the city council of Nizhny Novgorod Mikhail Zhizhin. He was also the president of the Harmony group. Information about this was indicated on the website of the City Duma itself (archival link).

Zhizhin was a deputy from 2005 to 2010. He served on the Property and Land Relations Commissions as well as the City Development, Construction and Architecture Commission. However, first of all, he was known not as a politician, but as a businessman. The Harmony company he created for several decades was one of the largest in Nizhny Novgorod. According to various sources, in total, he controlled about 200 Nizhny Novgorod firms.

In 2020, Zhizhin was detained in Spain as part of a group of 23 people in the case of the "Russian mafia." All of them were suspected of laundering money obtained by criminal means. Writes about this "Komsomolskaya Pravda."

The investigation was conducted for seven years, and searches were carried out in several European cities at once - Madrid, Ibiza and Tarragona. According to the police, this group hoped to control key sectors of the Spanish economy.

The question is what kind of money Zhizhin and Co could have launched criminal activities in Spain. Not from, presumably, underpaid taxes to the budget of the Nizhny Novgorod region?

Mikhail Zhizhin could create a whole criminal empire for tax evasion and withdrawal of funds abroad. Photo: https://startgames.org/novosti/mixail-zhizhin-nizhnij-novgorod-biografiya.html

Divide and infer

And it doesn't seem to be just taxes. You can try to guess why Mr. Zhizhin abruptly left the country after 2019. In the same year, a series of searches took place at the place of residence of Zhizhin and his partner, already mentioned Maxim Shaposhnikov, who co-founded the construction company TP Nizhegorodets.

The searches took place as part of a criminal case on fraud on an especially large scale. It was assumed that the defendants could withdraw several billion rubles abroad. One of the addresses where the operatives arrived was the cottage where the director of the Harmony-Nizhegorodets group of companies, Utah LLC and Utah-NN LLC Sergey Motorkin, lives.

At the same time, another criminal case was initiated earlier - on the fact of evasion by the management of OOO TP Nizhegorodets from paying VAT and income tax due to fictitious document flow with a one-day company.

During this investigation, the trading company was forced to pay to the budget part of the arrears in the amount of over 500 million rubles. And after LLC PKF "Harmony" recovered from LLC TP "Nizhegorodets" under loan agreements 1.9 billion rubles. late fines and 669 million rubles of interest for the use of borrowed funds. Both companies, the borrower and the lender, were affiliated through their co-founder Maxim Shaposhnikov.

Zhizhin could not be the only person associated with power who could be involved in unseemly affairs with Shaposhnikov. Previously, the co-founder of TP Nizhegorodets was also Vladimir Goikhman - the nephew of Alexei Goikhman, who previously, like Zhizhin, was a deputy of the Duma of Nizhny Novgorod.

And this is the second such tax case related to the company. According to Delovoy Kvartal, according to investigators, Nizhegorodets has concluded a number of contracts with a construction company, including for the reconstruction of real estate objects.

Despite the fact that the announced work was not completed, the management of the Nizhegorodets shopping center signed economic documents indicating their implementation and fictitious expenses allegedly incurred in relations with the construction organization were illegally included in the tax return.

Very similar to the classic withdrawal of funds. At the same time, the investigation established that the construction company is not located at the registration address, it does not have a number of employees, and management provided tax reports with minimal indicators.

This firm still exists today. The owner of 100% of the shares is Maxim Shaposhnikov, who, apparently, remained on the farm while the partner was settling in Spain. Only here she changed the name - now it is Grandtrast-NN LLC. Another thing is interesting: in recent years, the company has not received a penny of revenue and profit, but it has a negative asset value of 2 billion rubles.

Photo: Rusproflie.ru

But that's not all. It turned out that the company was a large contractor under government contracts in the amount of 273 million rubles. It turns out that "left" could go not only taxes, but also direct budget allocations for construction work. At the same time, from 2011 to 2014, the company had seven contracts at once, the execution of which was terminated for various reasons.

Photo: Rusproflie.ru

Oleg Terekhin ended up under a criminal case. It was initiated in 2022, and concerned the embezzlement of 47.2 million rubles of value added tax (VAT) from the budget and the creation of a dummy legal entity for the withdrawal of assets, Kommersant writes about this.

Specifically, Terekhin was accused of illegally creating a legal entity using his official position and conspiring with other persons involved in the case - former directors of Kamenishchensky Quarry LLC and Sevastopolsky residential complex Roman Kosarev, Sergei Medvedev and accountant Galina Modelkina.

According to the investigation, in 2016, Roman Kosarev, on behalf of Kamenishchensky Quarry LLC, fictitiously sold the company's assets - a dolomite flour plant and inventories - affiliated through the founders of the Sevastopol residential complex. Property purchase and sale agreements were not paid, as they provided for a deferral of payment, and the company that bought the plant with equipment immediately leased it back to the seller.

This could be a fake deal, made only for the Kamenishchensky quarry to be entitled to VAT refunds from the budget.

After the Inspectorate of the Federal Tax Service for the Prioksky District approved the tax deduction and transferred 47.2 million rubles to the company, the funds went to the accounts of other companies of the Harmony group, in particular, they paid off the loan taken by LLC "Firm" Highway, "in which Roman Kosarev also acted as director.

Vasenev - next?

Returning to Vasenev, it seems that after all Zhizhin's criminal cases, his partners Maxim Shaposhnikov and Oleg Terekhin decided to hide, and not put their activities on display as founders of the main legal entities. Perhaps that is why Alexey Vasenev became the owner of the same Balsam in 2019. At the same time, he can turn the same schemes that were previously attributed to Zhizhin and Co.

For example, there is a court case that invalidated a real estate pledge agreement on a loan (10 million rubles) issued by Vasin to a certain Avangard company. As a result, the company was declared bankrupt, where, in the end, the funds went - not clear. It may well be that in the same Spain.

Alexander Vasenev continues the case of Zhizhin and Co.? Photo: https://www.niann.ru/?id=383213

All this can be one group of people, and because of their actions, the budget could miss billions of rubles. At the same time, as far as is known, despite the criminal cases of (former?) Partners, the same Vasenev calmly continues his activities. Maybe it's time for law enforcement officers to take a closer look at him too?