Turkish company Gemlik Gubre San. A.S provided confirmation that fertilizers imported into Ukraine by the Cooperative FUAC (First Ukrainian Agricultural Cooperative) fertilizer shipped from their factory in Turkey.

In a letter from the company dated March 19, it was reported that from December 2018 to February 2019, FUAC bought 19,700 tons of ammonium nitrate, which were delivered to Ukraine by 5 vessels.

Gemlik Gubre San is a large producer of ammonia and ammonium nitrate in Turkey since 1975 and is part of the structure of a large international company Yildirim Holding. The annual production capacity of Gemlik Gubre San plants is 600 thousand tons of ammonium calcium nitrate, 450 thousand tons of ammonium nitrate and 360 thousand tons of ammonia.

We remind that employees of the Kherson police conducted searches in the office of the brokerage company of the cooperative, the participants of which are 76 agro-enterprises of small and medium business, which consolidate 220 thousand hectares of land fund. The search was conducted within the framework of criminal proceedings, which was opened on the grounds of assumptions about forgery of certificates of origin and evasion of payment of countervailing duties for the import of mineral fertilizers to Ukraine.

Lawyer Dmitry Loshakov considers actions of the police unlawful, because exclusively the investigating authorities of the DFS of Ukraine can investigate criminal proceedings under these circumstances. Therefore, conducting a search by police officers within the framework of this criminal proceeding is a gross violation of Art. 216 CPC of Ukraine. The lawyer points out that solely the interdepartmental commission under the Ministry of Economic Development may establish the evasion of the payment of compensation. However, at the end of January 2019, this commission refused the Union of Chemists of Ukraine, acting in the interests of one of the oligarchs of chemical enterprises, in violation of a special investigation on these grounds.

The UAC believes that the searches are aimed at continuing the pressure of Ukrainian agrarians in order to keep chemical enterprises controlled by the oligarchs during the sowing campaign continuing to earn a monopoly high price for mineral fertilizers in Ukraine.

UAC and FUAC applied to the acting Minister of Agrarian Policy Olga Trofimtseva requesting to intervene in this situation.