Peculiarities of national raiding: the invaders of the Melitopol enterprise went unpunished
Raider takeovers of enterprises in Ukraine have become not only a common practice, but also a completely unpunished activity. The materials of the verdict on the failed seizure on April 2014, XNUMX in the city of Melitopol, Zaporozhye region are one of the typical examples.
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In the first half of the day, overcoming resistance at the checkpoint, a dozen athletic-looking young men in balaclavas and carrying bats burst into the territory of the enterprise for the repair and production of spare parts for agricultural machinery. Their “chief” turned out to be the former co-owner of the business. He burst into the director’s office with a bat at the ready and tried to force him to rewrite the documents on ownership of the enterprise.
The company's workers were in panic. The accountants escaped through the windows, as the doors were blocked by thugs with bats. The shop foreman called the police. Meanwhile, the director’s common-law wife was not at a loss and approached the window glass from the street, trying to film what was happening on her mobile phone.
Noticing this sabotage, the raider broke the window. The woman responded by turning on the voice recorder on her phone, sticking her hand through the opening. But she immediately received a blow to the hand with a bat, the phone was broken and the recording of the crime was destroyed.
Nevertheless, the result was achieved: due to the fact that the defenders stalled for time with their resistance to the invaders, the raid failed. Both the police and journalists arrived.
It is interesting how the law enforcement system behaved in this case.
Firstly, it was difficult for them to classify the crime. Despite the fact that the criminal code contains an article “illegal seizure of enterprise property,” which undoubtedly happened, the prosecutor defined the attackers’ actions as hooliganism, and the judge did not agree and reclassified it to an even lighter article.
Secondly, the trial of the case took place more than two years after the incident, when all the statutes of limitations for punishment for a crime of minor gravity had passed, and its consequences (damage from a blow to the hand with a bat), too, and therefore the accused paid only material damage - one and a half thousand hryvnia for a broken window.
And thirdly, the accused himself explained his actions as a protest against the fact that the enterprise no longer belonged to him. So he “tried to attract the city’s attention to the problem,” and the participants in this action were his “friends and acquaintances.”
The court ordered the culprit to pay ten thousand hryvnias in moral damages in addition to one and a half thousand hryvnias in material damages.
So, as long as such a practice of justice continues to flourish in Ukraine, one cannot dream of any investment boom.
Peculiarities of national corporate raiding: the Melitopol enterprise's hijackers went unpunished