Owners of Salt Lake Trucking Group have been found guilty of wire fraud charges in a scheme that involved bribing FedEx Ground employees in order to obtain millions of dollars in contracts.
A jury in a Utah federal district court has found Yevgeny Felix Tuchinsky and Konstantin Mikhaylovich Tomilin guilty of one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The two men are among 10 individuals who were indicted for a fraud scheme involving trucking companies, a high-ranking FedEx employee and millions of dollars.
Several different trucking companies comprise Salt Lake Trucking Group. The group is owned by Tuchinsky, Tomilin, Alexsander Vasiliyevich Barsukov and Leonid Isaakovich Teyf. Felix Tsipelzon, a former truck driver, was manager of the parent company and co-owner of two of the smaller trucking companies.
FedEx Ground delivers packages using contract service providers. Although destinations of some hauls are temporary, others are more permanent, with the latter called assigned runs. When a new assigned run is created, contractors are notified it’s open for applications. Contractors with the most points typically receive the runs. Points are acquired daily for each run, as well as for positive safety inspections and during peak seasons. Points can be deducted for crashes. Unassigned runs are awarded on a rotating basis.
From 2009 to 2019, the Salt Lake Trucking Group co-conspirators paid bribes to Ryan Mower, a FedEx Ground line-haul manager. Mower was the company’s highest-ranking Utah employee from about 2008 to October 2019 and awarded runs. Specifically, the trucking owners paid Mower about $3,000 a month in order to receive runs.
Rather than post assigned runs, Mower granted the contracts to Salt Lake Trucking Group trucks.
By obtaining these runs, the trucking company fraudulently accrued more points, putting it in a better position to legitimately acquire assigned runs.
In a 2018 incident, a Salt Lake Trucking Group truck was involved in a crash. Tsipelzon notified Mower of the crash, worried about losing points. Mower responded by saying, “I’ve got you (covered).” No points were deducted, allowing the trucking company to continue to grow under the FedEx Ground contract policies.
FedEx Ground limits to 15 the number of trucks a contractor can have servicing the same hub. However, with the help of Mower, Salt Lake Trucking Group operated about 70 runs from the North Salt Lake hub.
Contractors are paid on a per-mile basis. As part of the fraud scheme, Mower inflated the number of weekly miles driven by Salt Lake Trucking Group’s trucks. In some cases, the company accrued payments for routes it never ran. It once received an extra 572 miles on a run and another time received $1,850 for a trip that never took place.
In addition to Mower, at least two FedEx Ground dispatchers also received bribes from the trucking company. About $20,000 was paid to the dispatchers in exchange for obtaining unassigned runs.
Over a 10-year period, Salt Lake Trucking Group received about $150 million in revenue from FedEx Ground.
Mower received bribes totaling $300,000. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Utah, Tuchinsky personally gained $7 million, and Tomilin personally gained over $4 million from the scheme.
Tuchinsky and Tomilin are scheduled to be sentenced in May.
Last year, Teyf was sentenced to two years in prison and ordered to pay $1.38 million in restitution. Barsukov pleaded guilty in 2022 and is scheduled to be sentenced in June. Tsipelzon and Mower also pleaded guilty, and both will be sentenced later this month.
Herbert Ugarte, a trucking company owner in a separate indictment, was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay restitution of nearly $1.2 million. Davor Kovacevic and Zlate Balulovski also bribed Mower in a third indictment. Both were sentenced to four years of probation and ordered to pay more than $300,000 in restitution. In a fourth indictment involving bribes to Mower, William Murdock was sentenced to one year in prison and ordered to pay more than $1 million in restitution. LL
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