Tax Cops Raise Curtain on Film Studio.

(From The Moscow Times)

Olga Darfi was fresh out of film school when she got what she thought was her big break -- an offer from a famous producer to direct a new action movie.

Shortly after she graduated from Russia's premier film school, VGIK, in 2001, a friend introduced her to Maxim Fedoseyev, a producer at the Novy Vek studio who said he was looking for a young and talented director to shoot a movie about bowling. It was called "Sfera," or sphere.

"Fedoseyev told me I would direct the film because they needed a young, dynamic director who could get a good script written. He said there would be plenty of money, a budget of $1 million," Darfi said. "This was huge for me. I turned down other offers to work on 'Sfera.'"

What Fedoseyev did not tell Darfi is that she had just become a small cog in a multimillion-dollar tax-evasion scheme.

After hammering out a number of scripts with screenplay writers over the next two months, Darfi said Fedoseyev suddenly stopped calling.

"When I called him, he said the deal was off because the investors had offered him too small a sum to produce the picture, and that I shouldn't worry about it because they hadn't planned to pay me much either," she said. "I was shocked, it was a very emotional for me."