Epicenter's debts: the company's former IT employees have not yet been paid about UAH 1.5 million. DOU investigation

Since December 2021, the story of non-payment of money to former employees of Epicenter m, whom the management decided to transfer to the parent company Epicenter K, allegedly to "optimize their work", has been dragging on. Part of the team decided to quit. At the same time, as noted by former IT specialists of the company, they did not receive money for several weeks of work.

DOU already wrote about this story in January 2022. And although more than half a year has passed, the situation with debt has not changed. And in particular, due to non-payment of money to developers, its CEO Artem Shevchenko left epicenter m.

Details can be found in the new DOU investigation.

Changes in the management team

As it became known back in January of this year, the merger of Epicenter M and Epicenter K companies began in the fall of 2021.

Epicenter m positioned itself as an autonomous IT company within epicenter holding. The main product it developed was the marketplace platform. Since November 2021, part of the team has been offered to go under the management of the parent company Epicenter K, which belongs to the Gereg couple. Co-owner of the company Alexander Gerega is a people's deputy of Ukraine.

Epicenter M LLC was registered in 2020. As of January 2022, the founders of the company were epicenter K LLC and Lyudmila Lazareva, who owned about 20%. The company's signatory was Artem Shevchenko.

Earlier, Shevchenko, together with Lazareva and a number of other individuals, founded Hubber LLC, a company that created an online platform for trading platforms and suppliers of goods.

Now there are changes in the composition of Epicenter M — instead of Artem Shevchenko, Yuriy Yakovlev is listed as the head of the company.

As Shevchenko told us, no one received the payment, and he quit:

"But the war started, so loud statements were out of time. I quit in February when I got back from vacation. I did it almost immediately. But officially, the company held it on April 1. Since January 15 (from the day of my vacation — Ed.), I have not been to the epicenter m office."

Almost 20 developers were left without payments

According to Artem Shevchenko, first there was a managerial agreement that the team that performed purely tasks for epicenter m begins to do them for epicenter K. This letter was approved on November 20, 2021. That is, from the next day, epicenter K takes over its responsibilities to the team. This applied both to paying for vacations and directly paying for work. But epicenter K did not fulfill these duties.

According to Shevchenko, 26 specialists joined epicenter K. In confirmation, he provided a list.

As a result, almost 20 former developers of Epicenter M were left without payments, said its former CEO Artem Shevchenko. The total amount of debt reaches more than UAH 1.5 million.:

"Neither wages nor money were paid for unused vacations. At the end of 2021, the process of transferring developers from epicenter M to epicenter K began, in accordance with the agreement on the merger of IT departments. Epicenter m paid the salary that was accrued as of 20.11.2021.since November 21, Igor Voityuk, It director of Epicenter K, has taken over the actual salary responsibilities. After that, the developers were still working almost until the end of the year, and part of the team decided to leave the company. But they didn't get any money for their work. And Epicenter K did not take any actions to pay the developers ' salaries and vacation pay."

For example, in a screenshot provided by DOU from correspondence for December 2021 by epicenter K HR, Sergey Opanasenko says that the issue of payments is controlled "at the highest level".

Probably, we are talking about the owners of the company — the Gereg couple.

Artem Shevchenko also provided screenshots confirming the team's work at Epicenter K.

Due to a conflict with non-payment of money to the team, Shevchenko left the company. At the same time, when he was on vacation at the beginning of the year, his pass was blocked:

"When I was on vacation (January 2022 — ed.), my pass was blocked, in fact, a new management was put in the company. This was done, in my opinion, because I did not agree to comment on the situation with non-payment of salaries in order to whiten the "epicenter". So I left the company."

Epicenter's ex-developers no longer expect payments

We talked to some former employees of Epicenter m.

According to back-end developer Vladislav Pozdnyakov, who has been working at Epicenter M since March 2020, after the merger of the companies, he decided not to continue cooperation, worked for two weeks and quit, but did not receive payment for the work. According to him, in February 2022, the team was still trying to resolve the issue:

"At that time, I was collecting information to sue, but the war broke out. I doubt that we will be paid anything. Now I'm not ready to deal with a lawsuit. I haven't heard from any of the ex-employees I talk to that anyone has been paid."

Konstantin Glushchenko, a former Senior back-end developer at Epicenter m, also told his story. He worked for the company from September 2020 to December 2021. According to him, in November last year, he was included in the lists of those who are transferred to epicenter K. After coming out of vacation, he decided not to cooperate with Epicenter K. At the same time, I did not receive any money for my work. The company owes him about one and a half salaries:

"The payments never took place, despite the promises. In early February, we were assured that everything was being resolved. After that, head of Recruitment it "epicenter K" Sergey Opanasenko turned to us with a request to return the equipment and assurances that everything is being solved gradually: first the equipment, and then payments. Unfortunately, these were just another unfulfilled promise. My colleagues and I returned the equipment, received workarounds with signatures, and finally handed over our passes. After that, Opanasenko stopped responding to messages altogether."

Konstantin Glushchenko also noted that, according to his information, the debt was not paid to anyone.:

"I am not aware of a single case where someone from the list of people who were transferred to epicenter K and who did not want to continue cooperation was given any payments. Also, I'm not sure that everyone who stayed at Epicenter M was fully paid off. Communication after February was completely interrupted."

Non-payment of the debt was confirmed to us by another Ex-developer of Epicenter, who wrote a review on the company's page on the DOU website in winter. He noted that epicenter regarded his comment as non-fulfillment of obligations.

Another developer, on condition of anonymity, confirmed the company's non-payment of the debt, claiming that representatives of Epicenter simply stopped contacting. According to him, after the merger, epicenter K finally left to work up to 10 people from the old team. Now, according to him, even less.

How the issue will be resolved is unknown

To find out the company's position, we wrote a request to the official email address of Epicenter M. However, no response was received at the time of publication of the article.

We also called Epicenter K Head of Recruitment Sergey Opanasenko, who declined to provide an extended comment on the situation. At first, Opanasenko said that he had no idea about the debt, "because he is not a financier.":

"Here different people were the heads of this enterprise. Some don't work anymore. So that new people can comment on some old issues... There's a war in the country, who can help me? I have no comment on this. The company has a position, but I do not know who can express it."

When asked if Opanasenko had heard about the debt, he said that he had heard about the situation no more than others: "I know about it in general terms, that there is some unresolved issue."

"I don't know why this happened. It will be decided exactly — it is not in the spirit of the "epicenter" to leave unresolved issues, given the practice of previous years. And who will do this and who is responsible, unfortunately, I do not have such information."

The representative of Epicenter K declined to comment on Shevchenko's dismissal.

Sergey Opanasenko offered on Monday (18.07.2022) to provide more complete information from the company, but did not get in touch.

We are ready to post an official comment from epicenter after it is received.

Update from 15:30 on July 21

After the article was published, epicenter M sent its position. It confirms that epicenter m stopped cooperation with some developers on November 20, 2021, so the company has no debt to contractors.:

"In the future, software product development services were not provided by these individual entrepreneurs of Epicenter M LLC, as it was decided on their further cooperation with Epicenter K LLC.

Whether epicenter K plans to close the debt has not yet been answered.

The Author Is Elena Chernyshova.