The Great Freight-Forwarder’s Folly, or How Mr. Pisanuk Attempted to Outwit the Exchequer

Pray, cast your eyes upon the frozen reaches of Novy Urengoy, where a gentleman of commerce, one Mr. Ivan Pisanuk, has recently discovered that the law possesses a memory far more enduring than his own sense of civic duty. Mr. Pisanuk, a merchant whose fortunes were built upon the hauling of heavy goods, apparently harboured the quaint notion that the Crown’s taxes were merely suggestions, rather than obligations.

Between the years of 1819 and 1821—or, as the modern calendar would insist, 2019 to 2021—this audacious speculator managed to evade the payment of some seventy million roubles. How did he achieve this feat of financial legerdemain? By means of the most traditional tool of the rogue: the falsified declaration. With the flourish of a pen and a heart full of avarice, he presented the tax authorities with documents of such imaginative fiction that they would have put the most seasoned novelists of Fleet Street to shame.

Alas! The bubble of this commercialist’s fantasy burst with a most satisfying thud. The court, in its infinite wisdom and sternness, delivered its verdict on the 9th of September. Mr. Pisanuk, having been found guilty of evading taxes on a scale that can only be described as 'prodigiously greedy,' now finds himself in a predicament of most distressing proportions.

To cure this sudden bout of fiscal amnesia, the judge has seen fit to impose a fine of four hundred million roubles! A sum so vast that one imagines the poor fellow's face turned the colour of a mouldy Stilton the moment the sentence was read. While the rogue has already managed to cough up some twenty-one million roubles during the investigation—likely fearing a cold cell and a thin blanket—the remainder of his debt still looms over him like a London fog.

One cannot help but admire the irony: the man who spent years pretending his coffers were empty must now find a way to fill them to the brim for the benefit of the State. Truly, there is no comedy quite so rich as that of a bankrupt swindler attempting to pay a king's ransom!