Legal Practices: Bankruptcy, White-Collar Crime, GR-Litigation, Anti-raiding Defence

White-Collar Crime in Ukraine refers to economic criminal proceedings against business owners and senior management — tax evasion (Article 212 of the Criminal Code), fictitious entrepreneurship, fraud, money laundering, abuse of power. Effective defence requires engaging counsel immediately after the first investigative action: a search, a witness summons, or a notice of suspicion. Litigant's strategy: 24/7 procedural response during search and seizure, legal assessment of the case at the pre-trial stage, building a defence position across all instances — from local court to Supreme Court. The principle is to dismiss the charges at the stage where there is no public exposure, not just to win at trial.

Anti-raiding engineering means building systemic legal barriers that make a hostile takeover economically pointless. Preventive layer: corporate structure audit, identifying weaknesses (charter documents, registers, shareholder agreements, security over key assets), restructuring ownership through holdings and trusts, duplicating critical documentation in secure storage. Reactive layer once an attack begins: judicial injunctions blocking unlawful registration actions, criminal proceedings against participants under Article 206 of the Criminal Code (obstruction of lawful business activity), tracing beneficiaries via international requests. Litigant handles these cases end-to-end — from registry-level actions to the Supreme Court, with a focus on stopping the attack and recovering assets if already seized.

An arbitration manager is appointed by the court in bankruptcy proceedings and performs one of three functions: property administrator at the asset administration stage, rehabilitation manager when an insolvency restructuring plan is approved, or liquidator in the liquidation procedure. Creditors want an independent professional who will conduct asset inventory, challenge suspicious transactions of the debtor over the past three years (Article 42 of the Bankruptcy Code of Ukraine), recover receivables, and ensure equal satisfaction of claims. Iurii Grygorenko is both an arbitration manager and Secretary of the UBA Bankruptcy Committee — a dual role that ensures technical precision and current Supreme Court jurisprudence awareness.

GR-Litigation (Government Relations Litigation) is a legal strategy that combines judicial appeals against state authority decisions with parallel work on the regulatory environment to prevent the problem from recurring. Classic example: the tax authority charges millions in VAT for allegedly fictitious operations — Litigant challenges the decision in administrative court (tactics) while simultaneously initiating amendments to the secondary tax act that enabled such assessments in the first place (strategy). Another example: appealing an Antimonopoly Committee ruling while lobbying changes to the market analysis methodology. This is work not only on one case, but on the future — so the business does not return to the same problem next year.

Challenging Ukrainian tax authority decisions has two stages: administrative appeal (a complaint to the higher-level tax body within 10 working days of receiving the tax notification-decision) and judicial appeal in the district administrative court. Common business mistakes: missing the 10-day deadline (then court is the only option left), incorrect legal qualification (e.g., appealing on substance instead of procedural violations), lack of expert evidence on transactions (commodity, transport, financial). Litigant builds defence on two layers: procedural violations during the audit (assignment, notification, act execution) and substantive arguments on the reality of operations. Strategically, the position must be ready BEFORE the decision arrives — at the audit stage.