How a Ukrainian Businessman Helped Divest Sanctioned Russian Assets Worth UAH 1 Billion

On June 24, it was reported that the National Police had served suspicion notices to Brovary-based businessman Serhii Shapran over his alleged role in removing Russian assets from under sanctions. This case may further highlight the weaknesses in Ukraine’s sanctions enforcement and other gaps in the current system.

As previously revealed by journalists from the Schemes investigative project, in 2024 Shapran became the new owner of Ukrainian one billion- worth assets belonging to Russian businessman Igor Naumets. He managed to do so despite Naumets being under the NSDC sanctions and his property being seized. The assets in question belong to Naumets’s holding Unigran, which extracts minerals from quarries in the Zhytomyr region and manufactures paving tiles. They include production facilities, machinery, hundreds of railcars, and hundreds of hectares of land.

Shapran is suspected of committing multiple offenses under the Criminal Code. Specifically, he is suspected of “organizing the acquisition, possession, and disposal of property under circumstances that indicate its criminal origin, committed by an organized group on a particularly large scale.”

According to Schemes, Serhii Shapran is a Brovary-based businessman with reported ties to Oleh Kiper, the former Kyiv Prosecutor and current Head of Odesa Regional Administration. Notably, in addition to NSDC-imposed sanctions, Naumets’s assets were also seized in several criminal proceedings launched at the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Yet even these restrictions failed to prevent the transfer of ownership.

The Shapran case could serve as a litmus test for identifying flaws in Ukraine’s anti-Russian sanctions policy and the criminal prosecution of sanctioned persons.

TI Ukraine has repeatedly drawn attention to these systemic weaknesses and has recommended improvements, including:

• Adopting Draft Law No. 12406, which would finally criminalize violations and circumvention of sanctions in Ukraine, following the example of EU legislation. This would significantly enhance the ability to prosecute offenders like Shapran and his accomplices
• Avoiding the blending of sanctions enforcement and criminal proceedings against sanctioned persons, particularly with regard to the seizure and confiscation of their assets. Parallel actions by authorized bodies in both processes are often counterproductive
• Improving the asset blocking mechanism following NSDC decisions. Currently, this procedure lacks effectiveness when it comes to sanctioned individuals, a deficiency once again highlighted by the Shapran case.

We will continue to follow this story closely, as Shapran’s case may further expose the systemic problems surrounding the circumvention of sanctions and the failure to hold violators accountable.