Restricting access to information about the tax debts of specific sole proprietors deprives Ukrainian businesses of one of the tools they use to vet potential business partners, according to Opendatabot CEO Alexei Ivanikin.
According to the service’s data, as of July 2026, approximately 1.5 million sole proprietors have tax debts, and the total amount of debt reaches 16.6 billion UAH.
However, since the start of the full-scale war, the State Tax Service has not published a public list of specific entrepreneurs in debt, even though data from the Unified State Register and general statistics on tax arrears remain publicly available.
“It is difficult to explain this restriction on security grounds: information about an individual entrepreneur’s tax debt does not contain any defense-related or strategically important details,” Ivanikin stated.
In his view, transparency of information has direct economic significance.
“When information about tax debt is public, entrepreneurs have an additional incentive to pay it off, as it affects their reputation and the choice of business partners. Since the start of the war, businesses have lost one of the tools for vetting counterparties and cannot see whether a potential partner is paying taxes,” noted the CEO of Opendatabot.
The number of entrepreneurs with tax arrears has increased approximately 2.3-fold since the start of the full-scale invasion—by 840,000 people—and the total amount of arrears has risen by 9.6 billion hryvnia.
In Ukraine, 1.5 million sole proprietors have tax debt, the total amount of which reached 16.6 billion UAH as of July 2026, according to data from the State Tax Service published by Opendatabot.
Since the beginning of 2026, the number of individual entrepreneurs with tax debt has increased by approximately 3%, while the total amount of debt has decreased by 300 million UAH.
On average, each individual entrepreneur with tax debt owes the state about 11,000 UAH in unpaid taxes.
In recent years, the number of entrepreneurs with tax debts has been growing by an average of about 16% annually.
Since the start of the full-scale war, the number of individual entrepreneurs in debt has more than doubled—by approximately 840,000 people—and the total amount of debt has increased by 9.6 billion hryvnias.
Thus, while at the start of the full-scale invasion, approximately 660,000 entrepreneurs had tax debts totaling about 7 billion UAH, by mid-2026 both figures had more than doubled.
Source: Opendatabot, based on data from the State Tax Service of Ukraine.
Revenues to Ukraine’s state budget from assets under ARMA’s management in January–July 2026 amounted to only 210 million UAH, compared to 1.3 billion UAH for the same period in 2025, said Pavlo Velykorechanyn, an expert with the Verkhovna Rada’s Anti-Corruption Committee and former deputy head of ARMA, in an exclusive interview with the “Interfax-Ukraine” news agency.
Thus, revenue has fallen by more than six times.
For comparison, according to Velykorechanyn, 7.5 billion hryvnias were transferred to the state budget in 2023, in part due to major cases involving special confiscation.
He noted that the current 210 million hryvnias is largely the result of managing assets transferred to ARMA back in 2024–2025. A significant portion of the revenue is linked to payments from Naftogaz.
According to Velykorechanyn’s assessment, there are currently virtually no new economically attractive assets in the agency’s portfolio. Furthermore, regarding certain properties, the results of tenders to select managers are being annulled, after which courts rule such decisions unlawful, forcing the state to fund property appraisals again.
He identified the length of the procedure for transferring assets to management as a separate problem. While the property remains without a manager, the state is forced to bear the costs of its security and maintenance, while the asset may physically deteriorate or lose value.
Despite the fact that the Register of Seized Assets contains tens of thousands of items, the number of assets with real economic potential accounts for only a small portion of the portfolio, said Pavlo Velykorechanyn, an expert on the Verkhovna Rada’s Anti-Corruption Committee and former deputy head of ARMA, in an exclusive interview with the Interfax-Ukraine news agency.
According to him, a significant portion of the property exists only on paper in the registry or is in such a condition that commercial management of it is impractical.
Among such assets, Velykorechanyn cited ruined farms, old, unusable vehicles, illiquid basement spaces, property lacking the necessary documentation, as well as assets destroyed after the start of the full-scale war.
Agricultural assets that have effectively ceased to exist for a long time—such as records of unharvested crops from previous years—constitute a separate category.
In Velykorechanyn’s view, ARMA must conduct a comprehensive identification of the portfolio and separate out the business assets that are truly economically attractive.
It is advisable to promptly sell illiquid or rapidly depreciating property through auctions rather than keeping it on the registry for years.
He also proposed reviewing court decisions regarding assets for which a manager has not been appointed within several months. Otherwise, the state continues to finance the storage and security of property that is gradually losing value.
The sale of the seized yacht “Royal Romance,” which is linked to Viktor Medvedchuk, has effectively been blocked due to a change in the procedure for the sale of Ukrainian assets located abroad, stated Pavlo Velykorechanin, an expert with the Verkhovna Rada’s Anti-Corruption Committee and former deputy head of ARMA, in an exclusive interview with the “Interfax-Ukraine” news agency.
According to him, the mechanism developed in 2023 allowed for the sale of seized assets through the “Prozorro.Sales” system, including assets physically located outside Ukraine.
However, the new government regulation stipulates that the sale of seized property abroad must take place on the basis of an asset-sharing agreement between states.
According to international practice, such a division typically becomes possible only after a final conviction by a court.
As a result, Velikorecchanin estimates that the Royal Romance may remain frozen abroad for several years while the trials in the main criminal cases are ongoing.
“The sale of Medvedchuk’s yacht has reached a dead end—these assets will simply remain frozen abroad for many years,” he stated.
The Royal Romance was previously seized in Croatia. Ukraine had attempted to arrange its sale, with the proceeds to be transferred to the state.
The Pechersky District Court of Kyiv has authorized the Asset Recovery and Management Agency (ARMA) to sell more than 8.3 million USDT worth approximately UAH 372 million, as current legislation effectively does not allow the agency to manage such assets in any other way, said Pavlo Velykorechanin, an expert of the Verkhovna Rada Anti-Corruption Committee and former deputy head of ARMA, in an exclusive interview with Interfax-Ukraine.
The decision to change the method of managing the seized virtual assets was adopted by the Pechersky District Court on August 14, 2026. The funds belonged to an organized transnational group of hackers and are stored on the WhiteBIT exchange.
According to Velykorechanin, after the USDT is sold, the proceeds may be placed in a deposit account. This approach makes it possible to reduce the state’s risks associated with possible changes in the value of virtual assets.
He noted that since 2025, ARMA has had the right to open a virtual asset wallet and accounts on specialized cryptocurrency platforms for the sale of cryptocurrency transferred to the agency. However, Ukraine still lacks a full-fledged mechanism for the conventional management of such assets.
In his opinion, a legally viable option remains the sale of crypto assets on market terms, followed by placing the proceeds on deposit or using them to purchase military bonds.
Velykorechanin also noted that in a number of countries, seized cryptocurrency is either held until a court decision is made or converted into traditional currency to reduce volatility risks. At the same time, the international practice studied by Europol practically does not provide for transferring cryptocurrency to an external manager in order to increase its value.
