Insurance

Kyiv, Ukraine, 12 November, 2021 – S&P Investment Risk Management Agency is pleased to announce that two lawyers have been included in the 2022 Edition of The Best Lawyers in Ukraine. Since it was first published in 1983, Best Lawyers® has become universally regarded as the definitive guide to legal excellence.

Best Lawyers has published their list for four decades, earning the respect of the profession, the media and the public as the most reliable, unbiased source of legal referrals. Its first international list was published in 2006 and since then has grown to provide lists in over 75 countries.

“Best Lawyers was founded in 1981 with the purpose of highlighting the extraordinary accomplishments of those in the legal profession. After four decades, we are proud to continue to serve as the most reliable, unbiased source of legal referrals worldwide,” says CEO Phillip Greer.

Lawyers on The Best Lawyers in Ukraine list are divided by geographic region and practice areas. They are reviewed by their peers based on professional expertise and undergo an authentication process to make sure they are in current practice and in good standing.

S&P Investment Risk Management Agency would like to congratulate the following lawyers named to 2022 The Best Lawyers in Ukraine list:

• Nataliia Osadcha – Investment
• Mykola Siutkin – Litigation, Mergers and Acquisitions Law, and Real Estate Law

Natalia Osadcha is Co-Founder and Partner of S&P Investment Risk Management Agency.

For over 20 years, Nataliia has been working in the field of law, risk management, investment, conflict resolution and government relation. She is an author of numerous research and articles on business protection and a creator of numerous investment strategies for a big international corporation in Ukraine.

Mykola Siutkin is Co-Founder and CEO of S&P Investment Risk Management Agency. He has been defending the interests of business in Ukraine in the field of law, business advising, risk management, business conflicts resolution and minimization for more than 18 years. He is also the founder and owner of the LDaily media platform.

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About S&P Investment Risk Management Agency

For the past 15 years, S&P Investment Risk Management Agency is a leading consulting company in Ukraine, which serves the largest foreign players, not only at the stage of entering Ukraine, but also in the process of implementing investment projects and support of everyday business activity. The agency has helped companies to develop unique investment solutions and strategies and to enter and operate in the Ukrainian market transparently and securely. S&P Investment Risk Management Agency assists large foreign companies in developing their business models and processes in Ukraine, in strict accordance with the high international requirements and standards for transparent business operations.S&P Investment Risk Management Agency main services include legal, risk management, financial audit and government relation.

9 June 2020 – S&P Investment Risk Management Agency is pleased to announce that Mykola Siutkin has been included in the 2021 Edition of The Best Lawyers in Ukraine for his work in Mergers and Acquisitions Law and Litigation. This is the second consecutive year that Best Lawyers has recognized Mykola Siutkin for Mergers and Acquisitions Law. Since it was first published in 1983, Best Lawyers has become universally regarded as the definitive guide to legal excellence.

Best Lawyers has published their list for over three decades, earning the respect of the profession, the media, and the public as the most reliable, unbiased source of legal referrals. Its first international list was published in 2006 and since then has grown to provide lists in over 75 countries.

“Best Lawyers was founded in 1981 with the purpose of highlighting the extraordinary accomplishments of those in the legal profession. After three decades, we are proud to continue to serve as the most reliable, unbiased source of legal referrals worldwide,” says CEO Phillip Greer.

Lawyers on The Best Lawyers in Ukraine list are divided by geographic region and practice areas. They are reviewed by their peers on the basis of professional expertise, and undergo an authentication process to make sure they are in current practice and in good standing.

About S&P Investment Risk Management Agency

For the past 15 years, S&P Investment Risk Management Agency has been a strategic business and legal advisor for large foreign companies. The Agency helps companies develop unique investment solutions and strategies, enter and operate in the Ukrainian market transparently and securely. We assist large foreign companies in developing their business models and processes in Ukraine in strict accordance with the high international requirements and standards for transparent business operations.

In 2020, S&P Investment Risk Management Agency signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Mr. Budiarsa Sastrawinata, Managing Director of Ciputra Group, one of Indonesia’s largest developers and real estate investors in the Asia-Pacific region, and Mr. Jörg Bahren, Director Projects & Investments of RE RISE GmbH International Investments and Development Projects Management Company.

S&P Investment Risk Management Agency has unprecedented experience in developing unique business solutions and strategies for ambitious organizations striving to turn risks into new business opportunities.

Why our approach is unique? We combine the legal tools and business strategies that our clients need with a strategy of minimizing possible business and investment risks.

Such solutions meet the high standards of transparent business conduct of our clients who are looking for high-tech and safe business solutions in a tough yet profitable business environment – the Ukrainian market.

Without exaggeration, we can state that the S&P Investment Risk Management Agency team is unique. The combination of legal education and practical experience has empowered us to create innovative, high-tech, and secure business and investment solutions. Outstanding strategic decisions made by the S&P Investment Risk Management Agency team over the last 15 years have saved billions of dollars for our clients.

We offer clients our unique experience and knowledge to minimize and avoid possible negative consequences and losses in the future, to create a successful business in Ukraine.

Our goal is to find the shortest way to creating a profitable business with minimal risks for our client.

Why should companies work on risks?

Why is it important to reduce risk?

The main reason is that by reducing risks, you minimize hours of litigation and criminal trials. This means you make savings. You save not only money but time, health and nerves, maintain your reputation and retain clients.

Unfortunately, in our country, most companies are at risk, especially in terms of additional tax assessment, as well as criminal prosecution, particularly in cases of tax evasion.

As a proficient executive, you are probably trying your best to prevent the above-mentioned unpleasant incidents from happening. However, not everyone can do this. Why?

The reason is that companies and their executives often lose sight of one important tool – issue or risk audit.

We are not talking about incredibly expensive financial audits. This is about a regular meeting with your business consultant and legal counselor in order to analyze the situation and gain an understanding of the ways to minimize additional charges or possible criminal trials. When we say to minimize, we mean keeping to a minimum or not getting at all.

The most interesting part is that such an analysis will definitely help you find similarities and/or patterns among all the problematic points. Most likely, you experienced all these problematic issues a dozen times before. As a result, you may have lost track of something significant. That is why the company constantly faces all the same issues.

For example, the policy of your company provides for engaging an external consultant only if you receive an additional charge on taxes and fees.

Some companies, even in this case, try to deal with this issue on their own. After receiving an additional charge on taxes, the company and its executives are expected to have expensive and complex litigation, and at the same time, experience all the “great” things about criminal trials with interrogations, searches, and seizures of accounts and property.

You immerse in the process of solving your issues so often that you simply don’t see the full picture from above. This is exactly why the only thing you do is trying to solve the already existing problems.

Ask yourself a question: “Can I do something another way? Can my company avoid these high-priced issues by implementing a different policy? What should I do so that I simply don’t have such difficulties in the future? ”

What would you do if you were told that you can reduce additional charges on taxes without even reaching the stage of receiving a tax note decision and tax prosecution if you begin to conduct an audit (analysis) at the stage of receiving a request yet not after receiving a tax charge?

Maybe it’s time to introduce new policies and rules that will reduce both financial and time costs, and in some cases even help prevent sensitive lawsuits and criminal trials?

THIS is all about the REASONABLE ECONOMY!

If you are ready, go ahead!

Order services by link https://forms.gle/jHvYVJPQmfCgQMfX7

Nataliia Osadcha, Co-founder of S&P Investment Risk Management Agency, shared her thoughts with LDaily on how to avoid issues in doing business during this extremely difficult time for the whole world. With 20 years of experience not only in saving but even developing a business during periods of crises of various levels, Nataliia advises first of all to search for new markets for activities. In fact, one of the most promising markets, especially for foreign business, is the Ukrainian one.

Communicating with our clients and partners from all over the world, we don’t have a shadow of doubt that the entire world is already in crisis due to the spread of COVID-19. As an anti-crisis management business consultant with over 20 years of experience, I can say with 100% certainty that the crisis is not something far and unknown for Ukraine and Ukrainians. For this country, the crisis is a daily reality. Unfortunately, or fortunately, crises have haunted our country since the day of its creation. It began with the years of independence, then we had the revolution and the war, and all this happened in the short 27 years of the country’s existence. As an anti-crisis consultant, I can explain all the mechanics of entering a crisis, passing through and getting out of it. Here is what a business needs to know about the crisis:

1. The crisis cannot be pleasant. It is complex from a psychological and financial point of view.
2. During the crisis, the established old processes and business solutions do not work and will not work.
3. In order to survive, a company needs to be able to rapidly change (business processes, search for new markets, ways to optimize and reduce operating costs, introduce new types of services, etc.) and make fairly fast and innovative management decisions.
4. You need to become flexible and start seeing opportunities where you simply haven’t seen them before or where there were no opportunities at all.
5. Accept the fact that financial losses are an invariable part of the crisis. However, this process is temporary and if everything is done correctly, minus will turn into a big plus.
6. Accept the fact that it may not work, but you should continue to act against all the odds. Every day you should do the best that can be done even in a very difficult situation.
7. Of course, never ever give up (the words of great Churchill during the great world crisis of 1941).
8. Create an anti-crisis headquarters which consists of your team members (it is better that experts from various departments be assigned to it), regularly conduct brain storming, and discuss new opportunities, existing challenges and possible options for action.
9. Study living examples in practice, the existing methods of overcoming the crisis.
10. Create your own anti-crisis strategy based on the individual needs of your business.
11. Select individual tools necessary and acceptable for your anti-crisis strategy implementation.
12. Check your anti-crisis strategy every day and make the necessary changes to it depending on the external and internal situation.
13. The good news is that every crisis has both its beginning and its end. The date of term of the crisis can be calculated to a high precision, based on the analytical data.

We can definitely state that crises are necessary for all of us – there is no growth without them, no change, no movement. A crisis is a unique opportunity; it works in the same way for a business, for a person or for the whole world; it is a chance to become even stronger. Moreover, if passing and exiting from the crisis properly, it will guarantee you incredible advantages and bonuses. What bonuses you can get in the case of the crisis:

1. Business processes optimization.
2. Search and development of new markets.
3. New products and services creation.
4. Business resilience to new challenges and crises.

Therefore, an anti-crisis way of thinking, studying the crisis and creating an anti-crisis business strategy should become an integral part of any business environment and any management decision made. An anti-crisis strategy developed and implemented in business processes in time will help move away from the ‘crisis = death or chaos’ concept, and move on to understanding that crisis = opportunity. Furthermore, there are huge opportunities for growth. This is what will help businesses and people be ready, come to the understanding that the crisis is a necessary part of growth and it is during the period of crisis that you can start with a breakout success.

For Ukraine, the crisis caused by COVID-19 is a big chance.

Almost all types of businesses have an anti-crisis strategy in Ukraine. It is simply impossible to survive in Ukraine, much less to become successful without an anti-crisis strategy. A great deal of companies does not know that they have such a strategy, but any Ukrainian company has it.

For a foreign investor, during the global crisis Ukraine is becoming attractive and these are the reasons:
1. Perfect territory location for the logistics services production and/or provision both for the domestic market and for the market of EU countries.
2. New market outlet (42 000 million people).
3. Possibility of obtaining a private ownership asset in conjunction with a land plot by purchasing the land directly from the state.
4. Significant reduction in operating costs for any business:

• Cheap labor force (there is a large number of skilled labor). A high salary for a highly skilled worker is €300
• Cheap local material resources used in production.
• Opportunity to receive reduced tax rates if an asset is sold in a special taxation zone.
• Low land and asset cost.

5. There is no severe competition; the market is not structured.
6. Minimum term to enter a new market.
7. Opportunity to receive planned profit during the global crisis.

Moreover, Ukraine is a new market which in fact is so much-needed by large industrial corporations that really suffered heavily due to the spread of COVID-19 and the actual shutdown of a huge number of business processes in the world. Therefore, Ukraine can become a lifeline that will allow many global corporations to stay afloat with their profit or at least without significant losses.
New markets give new opportunities, including the ability to stay alive. Be flexible and open to inevitable changes and you will change yourself, become stronger and discover new worlds.

Nataliia Osadchaya, the co-founder of S&P Investment Risk Management Agency, a Candidate of Legal Sciences, a Lawyer, an adviser on investment risks and conflicts.

We expected that “a new way of life” of Ukrainian business will become easier after the presidential and parliamentary races. However, large investors in Ukraine haven’t noticed any decrease in the number of problems over  the past few years; on the contrary, the difficulties of some of them have even become more global.

Large businesses have faced a significant increase in the number of criminal cases regarding tax, antitrust, environmental, and other issues recently.

The authorities of the Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine, including the GPU and NABU, intensified their activities recently. The spectrum of “questions” that arise in front of businesses is so wide that any system can be hardly traced. There is a high probability that such problems arise for large companies which are actively investing in Ukraine.

We are talking about criminal cases on causing damage to the state, tax evasion, fictitious entrepreneurship, forgery of documents, abuse of power, misappropriation and embezzlement of property through malpractice, violations of the environmental safety rules, damage to the land, pollution of the atmosphere, violations of the water protection rules – these are only some cases in which the state starts a criminal prosecution against large domestic and foreign businesses.

However, as our experience shows, the evidence in similar criminal cases against our clients is generally very weak. Despite this, business advisers have to take huge efforts to prove the absence of a crime and to stop the criminal prosecution, and restore the reputation of the company and its executives.

Business suffers from a variety of investigative actions conducted within the initiated criminal cases – search raids, the seizure of documents and equipment, the disclosure of bank secrecy, asset seizures, endless interrogations of management, employees and counterparties. All this ends with unspoken actions – eavesdropping and recording telephone conversations, removing information from servers of telephone companies, surveillance, etc. In addition, the entire business community is actively watching the whole process in relation to such companies, as after every high-profile investigative action, any search or inspection, relevant information appears in the media. So, another issue for a business suffering from conflicts is restoring its reputation and refuting this information or sharing its position with the public media.

Interestingly, many of the criminal cases, which have recently been intensified by investigative actions, have been initiated since the time of past power. It should also be remembered that the current law does not provide any terms for the criminal pre-trial investigation if a criminal case has been formally opened before March 15, 2018, and if a company is not suspected. The investigation process can last for years, during which any investigative action can be taken. That’s what is happening today. Limitations of the pre-trial investigation terms, which came into force on March 15, 2018, apply only to criminal proceedings opened after this date. Therefore, if a criminal case was instituted before March 15, 2018, we can forget about any pre-trial investigation period. What’s more, we used to face situations when for preserving the indefinite deadlines of the investigative actions, law enforcers found some old case initiated ages ago, changed the plot, attracted new sides, as a result, there was no time limit anymore! Keep in mind that courts satisfy any petitions of law enforcement agencies representatives in 95% of cases. These are requests regarding temporary access, searches, account and property seizures, bank secrecy, silent investigative actions (including wiretaps), etc.

So, the person under the investigative actions is left absolutely disempowered and without any chance to demonstrate evidence of his/her innocence.

So, one can actually submit evidence, but law enforcement agencies do not accept such documents physically. According to the current law of criminal procedure, the person being investigated does not have official status in the specific case before being suspected, therefore, no petition from such a person will be considered, and the documents received by the authorities are simply not included in the case.

Another matter of concern is that criminal cases being filed against large foreign companies that invest plenty of money in the economy, create jobs and pay large amounts of taxes.

All these negative phenomena affect the country image and discourage potential investors. It’s not a secret that foreign investors are interested in the safety of their investments and the level playing field within the legislation. Ukraine still needs to improve this.

Rescuing Businesses

There is no single answer to the question: “Why do businesses face problems?”. Each case is unique. It is clear that the underlying causes of such conflicts do not only relate to legal mistakes. I mean that legal or procedural mistakes not always become the basis for “starting creating problems” for businesses.

As for our experience, a fairly large percentage of our clients who have been the subject of serious prosecution by the state, have made mistakes at the initial stages of building their business processes. This allowed their “opponents” to turn these mistakes into a serious problem. Series of search raids in the company and its counterparties, the seizure of a huge number of documents, interrogations and examinations – all these consequences naturally arise if state bodies become interested in a business.

Resolving one of such cases took us a year of painstaking work, more than a hundred motions to the GPU, over 60 appeals to the court, official help from the diplomatic missions, international organizations and media channels. I’d like to highlight that one year is a strong result of solving such a complex conflict. The process can often last much longer, interfering with normal business processes and destroying the business reputation.

Being One Step Ahead

When the confrontation with law enforcement agencies sharpens, it becomes increasingly difficult to prove the correctness of a business. Both conflict sides possess evidence that goes in their favor. Therefore, the solution to such conflicts is a difficult process, but it is essential for a company. Sure, the victory in conflicts will be the immunity for possible subsequent attacks. Compromise is not the key in such confrontations, it is either defeat or victory. As our experience shows, compromise is an illusion; in fact, it is a sign of a future defeat. Our state has never compromised on business, except only temporarily and solely for the sake of winning in the future. Additionally, let’s not forget the considerable credibility that the new government now has.

Under such circumstances of political and social instability, it is crucial that all risks be calculated at the “zero” stage (it means before signing any contracts or before starting the implementation of any projects). Having this done won’t leave even the slightest opportunity for your opponents to cause problems to your business. Unfortunately, nowadays, we still have to save businesses than to minimize risks at the start. However, businesses learn from mistakes as humans do.

Being one step ahead of opponents is one of such lessons.