Criminal Investigation of ‘Eviterra Travel’ Employees
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According to investigators, during 2013 the employees of LLC ‘Eviterra Travel’ were selling tickets for the flights of various airlines on behalf of LLC ‘Avia Centr’. They then embezzled the money for the tickets in the sum of more than one million rubles (~$30K), thus breaching the subagent contract with the company. Avia Centr responded by canceling the tickets that were sold by ‘Eviterra Travel’.
“Currently all the necessary investigative measures are being taken to ascertain the circumstances of what happened and to narrow down the list of the people involved,” say the representatives of the Investigations Office.
Nikolai Zayarny, the head of ‘Eviterra Travel’, had this to say about the criminal case: “It seems to me that the investigators misconstrue the legal aspect of the situation: they appear to be under the impression that the failure of one legal entity to pay money to another legal entity directly led to the tickets being canceled, which is not the case. It can be said with complete certainty that the decision to cancel the tickets was taken unilaterally by the organization called ‘Avia Centr’. These things are not directly interconnected”.
Zayarny contends that the report of the Investigative Committee of Russia is wrong.
“We are going to appeal against this accusation,” he said.
The head of ‘Eviterra Travel’ also promises that reimbursing all the affected passengers will be the company’s top priority.
Yesterday in the evening the company took to its website to declare that it was accepting complaints regarding the cancellation of the tickets which had been bought last year.
According to ‘Eviterra Travel’, in order to get a refund for the tickets with the departure date later than January 8 passengers can send a request directly to ‘Avia Centr’ at eviterra@avia-ce
The major issue on the mind of online market players is whether or not the conflict between ‘Eviterra’ and ‘Avia Centr’ will affect the market, and whether clients will lose confidence in buying travel services online.
Executive Director of ATOR Maya Lomidze expects the scandal to attract the attention of law-makers.
“There will probably be initiatives to devise a set of regulatory documents for online agencies that sell separate services. Right now this sector of tourism is a mess, no one can tell who is responsible for what,” she said in an interview with TRN magazine.
According to the executive director of ATOR, the general consumer will now prefer the services of large and well-established agencies that have direct contracts with airlines. Smaller agencies will be trusted less.
“I think that this trend will last,” she said.
Lomidze also noted that ‘Avia Centr’ was able to mitigate the scale of the scandal by way of revoking the cancellation of tickets and refunding them at the company’s own expense. More than six thousand tickets for flights up to the end of 2014 were canceled. The schedule for refunds will be up on the company’s website today.
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