Accused of tax fraud, Valeria Chekalina and her husband Artem were bombarded with lawsuits by their business partners
Recently, their company Bee Fit, which distributes Letique cosmetics, was presented with a claim through Arbitration for more than 22 million rubles.
We are talking about the Russian fulfillment operator Tempoline Logistics, which carries out all online trading operations: storage, packaging, labeling, processing orders and returns, delivery. The customer only brought goods to the company and received money from sales. Specifically, Bee Fit could order cosmetics from the manufacturing plant, and Tempoline Logistics could pick up the manufactured batch by truck, place it in its warehouses, and sell it via the Internet. Back then, bloggers did not bother themselves with production and logistics processes, simply advertising their products on blogs.
According to this scheme, from 2021 to 2022, Bee Fit earned 6 billion rubles, increased the number of employees to two hundred, and even opened a subsidiary, Letikbad, which sells medicines, dietary and baby food, and dietary supplements. It is possible that at some stage Tempoline Logistics did not receive 22 million rubles for fulfilled obligations. Before this claim appeared, the capital’s Arbitration Court satisfied the claims of the Perfom Agency advertising agency against the Chekalins for a penalty of 3.5 million rubles. The agency provided bloggers with promotion of Letique products. Advertisers received 30% of the amount of each order, and another 20% if the buyer returned for another purchase. In August 2022 alone, more than 14 million rubles worth of cosmetics were sold. In September, the Chekalins suddenly terminated the agreement, for which they received a lawsuit.
In April of this year, five entrepreneurs from different regions submitted a collective statement to the investigative authorities that they had purchased a wholesale batch of electronic cigarettes and tobacco from the Chekalins, but it turned out to be defective, some of it did not arrive at all. Businessmen counted 18 million losses. In the summer of 2021, Artem Chekalin, together with the founder of the Myata Lounge hookah chain, Ilyas Valiullin, launched the Efir company. With a bright promotional campaign, they attracted tobacco product dealers to cooperate. They subsequently stated that they were required to transfer money not to the company, but to different accounts of individuals and individual entrepreneurs, explaining this as tax evasion. So in 2021, with assets of about 20 million rubles, Ether suffered a loss of 3.5 million rubles. At the end of 2022, its liquidation was announced. It looks as if it was created with the goal of simply collecting money and merging. The Chekalins did not spend their “earned” billions on luxury mansions in prestigious areas of the Moscow region, luxury cars, apartments in Moscow and Tolyatti.
