A new star has emerged on the volunteering horizon — Anton Shukhnin. The owner of the luxury clothing store chain Domino (which Shukhnin also calls Domino Group) has unexpectedly started purchasing off-road vehicles for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, caring for displaced children, and simply giving out useful advice. And all of this is done publicly, with maximum media coverage.
Anton Shukhnin was not previously known for ostentatious philanthropy. For this fashion retail guru, everything changed in August when the war he initiated over square meters in Kyiv’s Novopecherski Lypky began to backfire on him. By the way, the author of these lines wrote about this in the article «Anton Shukhnin vs. Vyacheslav Belimenko: The Information War of ’Russian Agents’».
Not only paid articles by Shukhnin’s enemies started appearing online. Journalists began actively investigating who this Anton Shukhnin is, the man who has developed an unhealthy burst of media activity. And they uncovered a lot of interesting details about him. To hide his dirty laundry, Anton Serhiyovych launched an unprecedented campaign for reputation whitewashing. The cost of this campaign might be several times higher than Shukhnin’s expenses on charity and support for the Defence Forces.
If we are to believe it, Anton Shukhnin regularly updates the vehicle fleet for fighters on the hottest frontlines while also supporting disadvantaged families of internally displaced persons. However, I must reiterate that information about Shukhnin’s charitable activities started appearing in the public domain only recently, to be precise — at the end of August this year. And the charitable organization «Domino Foundation» was founded by him together with his wife, Anastasiya Shukhnina, a former photo model from Selydove, just a month ago, in September.
Before this, neither Anton Shukhnin nor his Domino Group was mentioned in the context of volunteering or charity. Neither after 2014 nor after February 2022 — there were no media campaigns by Shukhnin to support fundraising for the Armed Forces of Ukraine or displaced persons. At least, I couldn’t find any such mentions.
Instead, it’s easy to come across traces of promotional campaigns for luxury clothing and accessories ordered by Shukhnin’s Domino.
For example, a year ago, «Domino» promoted a new collection by Dior. In this collection, the price of a single women’s handbag sometimes reaches the equivalent of six months’ salary for an AFU soldier on the frontline. Or the price of a decent rural house with gas, plumbing, and a garden, where a large family of internally displaced persons could live comfortably.
But let’s not be hypocritical. The rich have their quirks, and counting other people’s money is impolite, of course, unless you’re the tax authority. And it is precisely the tax authorities or the Bureau of Economic Security that should have questions for Domino and its owner.
Not long ago (until anonymous Telegram channels drew attention to it and sparked a scandal), the «Domino» chain didn’t even hide that it accepted cryptocurrency USDT as payment.
Читайте по темі: Domino на три юрисдикції: Шухнін вів справи в Криму за законами РФ, відкрив компанію в Казахстані після війни й зберіг бренд на ТОТ
The fact that Domino sells clothing for crypto was reported by the reputable publication RBC – Ukraine as early as May 2024.
It should be noted that Ukrainian legislation does not prohibit citizens from owning, selling, or buying cryptocurrencies. However, there is a clear ban on using crypto as a means of payment.
According to Article 192 of the Civil Code and the Law «On the National Bank of Ukraine», the only legal tender in Ukraine is the hryvnia. Therefore, transactions between individuals and legal entities in foreign currency or cryptocurrency are illegal.
A payment, for example, in USDT in Ukraine is physically impossible to process through a cash register or bank account. However, it is unlikely that Anton Shukhnin and similar businessmen are eager to «disclose» all their revenue in tax reports. On the other hand, stablecoins are an excellent payment method for corrupt prosecutors, judges, and other officials who would rather not explain to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau the origin of funds used to purchase sandals for 150,000 UAH or a handbag for half a million.
So even if Anton Shukhnin removed the mention of crypto payment options from the «Domino» website, it doesn’t mean that such an option no longer exists, for instance, for regular clients from the aforementioned groups.
And even if we’re talking about legal payment methods, it’s not entirely clear to whom the money goes. Logically, it ends up in Shukhnin’s pockets. But how?
On the official Domino website, in the “About the Company” section, it is stated that “Domino” is a “prestigious Ukrainian retailer” and a “company with exceptional experience.” But if we search for this company in the registers, we’ll find that it doesn’t exist.
LLC «Domino Group» with a statutory fund of 5,000 UAH, founded by Anton Serhiyovych Shukhnin in Donetsk in 2010, ceased to exist in the summer of 2014. According to data from the Opendatabot service, only three active legal entities remain in which Anton Shukhnin has some share.
These include the aforementioned charitable foundation, a small shoe manufacturing workshop in Dnipro, and a «shady» LLC that supposedly trades in gaseous and liquid fuel. There is no trace of a «prestigious retailer» or a «company with exceptional experience» named «Domino» or owned by Shukhnin.
In other words, there is neither a company nor a group of companies called «Domino». At least not legally. However, there is a sole proprietor (FOP) Shukhnin Anton Serhiyovych, registered in Odesa on Frantsuzkyi Boulevard, whose main activity is «retail sale of clothing in specialized stores.»
According to registration data, this FOP belongs to the second group and pays a single tax. Taking into account the Unified Social Contribution, military tax, and the single tax itself (20% of the minimum wage), it amounts to 4,160 UAH per month. However, for such an FOP, there is a strict income limit (and this refers to all funds received during the reporting period, without deducting business expenses) — 6,672,000 UAH per year. If an FOP of the second group exceeds this limit, they face problems.
Theoretically, this means Anton Shukhnin earns a little over six and a half million UAH per year from trading branded clothing and accessories. From this amount, significant expenses must be deducted for purchasing goods, transporting them from abroad (if they’re not produced in some underground factory in Brovary), renting retail space, paying salaries to sales consultants, and so on.
But how much money is actually circulating through the Domino network?
Recently, Anton Shukhnin released a press release claiming that his charitable organization spent 3 million UAH on an armored off-road vehicle for our defenders.
The press release includes the following detail:
“The transfer of the Hilux was made possible thanks to the initiative of Anton Shukhnin’s Domino network, which directed the profit from the holiday days of August 23-24 to the needs of the army.”
If we take this statement literally, the «Domino» network directed the difference between its income and expenses for two days, amounting to about 3 million UAH, to purchase a vehicle for the military. However, over the past few months, Anton Shukhnin has released dozens of press releases and promotional articles about his volunteering and charity, with claims that somewhat differ from one another. Some mention not profit but income, while others refer to revenue.
According to data from the Domino website, Shukhnin’s «luxury empire» includes, in addition to an online store, six boutiques in Kyiv, Khodosiyivka near Kyiv, and Odesa. These could easily generate at least 3 million UAH in income over two days.
That’s 45 million UAH per month and about half a billion per year. This doesn’t fit within the 6,672,000 UAH annual income limit for an FOP of the second group, which Anton Serhiyovych Shukhnin is. This exceeds the allowed income by about 75 times. And as we established earlier, Shukhnin has no legal entities through which to handle such sums without issue.
A clue was noticed by the administrators of one Telegram channel. They discovered that the owner of the Domino online store was, for some time, listed as FOP Khachkhardzhi Ivan Vasyliovych.
This is a sole proprietor, like Anton Shukhnin, of the second group (registration data can be viewed here). We found out that until last fall, the nominal owner of the online store was FOP of the second group Shukhnina Tetyana Oleksandrivna (likely our hero’s mother), then – Chuchuk Oksana Mykolaivna.
Currently, the owner of the Domino online store is not listed on the official website. Instead, there are nameless «sellers — entrepreneurial entities that sell goods at retail using the Domino trading platform, which is owned or otherwise authorized.» It’s likely that in offline Domino stores, goods are also sold by «shadow» entrepreneurial entities. In other words, dummy FOPs.
If Domino’s income really reaches 1.5 million UAH per day, Shukhnin would need not just a few but dozens of dummy FOPs to «digest» it. To be precise — over 70. Managing the accounting for such a number of phantom «entrepreneurs» becomes a non-trivial task, but it offers a very nice bonus — just on VAT alone, «savings» amount to several tens of millions of hryvnias per year. And conversion centers for cashing out money or converting to crypto charge a much smaller percentage than the state does for peace of mind.
And when customs or tax authorities catch one of Shukhnin’s «phantoms» attempting to import premium clothing and accessories at a price undervalued by hundreds of times, nothing will point to our fashion retail guru. The fiscal authorities will track down, for example, some alcoholic from Zhashkiv who doesn’t even realize that he imported from Italy and sells in the Domino VIP boutique on Velyka Zhytomyrska in Kyiv women’s Dolce&Gabbana trousers for 100,000 UAH per pair. And checking the Domino network for «schemes» won’t be possible. Because de jure, it doesn’t exist. It’s a phantom.
Thus, our observations lead to the conclusion that the «Domino» network, which Anton Shukhnin claims to own, strongly resembles an organized criminal group created for the purpose of evading taxes and other mandatory payments and fees on an especially large scale.