Scriabin's widow was cheated out of UAH 1.5 million: the National Police named the culprit and revealed the criminal scheme

The National Police has served a notice of suspicion to a music label director who defrauded the widow of a famous Ukrainian singer of UAH 1.5 million. After the artist's death, the woman became the owner of the rights to all his works and agreed with the label, whose representative used a criminal scheme to profit from the celebrity's inheritance.

OBOZ.UA has learned from its own sources that the rights to the songs of Kuzma Scriabin, who died in a terrible car accident in 2015, are at stake. According to the National Police, the singer's widow, Svitlana Babiichuk, founded a company to manage the intellectual property and granted permission to use the songs to a popular label that cheated her out of a considerable amount.

She agreed with the company, according to which she was to receive 70% of the income from the use of Scriabin's creative heritage. Accordingly, the label was to receive 30%. However, law enforcement officers found that the payments she received for three years did not correspond to the real market data. In other words, the label director deliberately underestimated the number of listens to the songs on streaming platforms, which reduced the amount of remuneration for the copyright holder.

In addition, the cyber police department found that an agreement was concluded with a Czech company that also distributes music to implement the criminal scheme. Svitlana Babiichuk was assured that they were a subsidiary of a Ukrainian label and did not receive any percentage of the profits. However, in reality, it turned out that they were pocketing about 85% of the revenue.

According to an independent intellectual property expert, Scriabin's widow should have received at least UAH 1.5 million in profit for the digital distribution of the artist's music between 2017 and 2019. However, the label director cheated the woman out of this amount.

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