It took only three court sessions to confiscate the largest bribe in the history of modern Russia from a law enforcement officer. The Nikulinsky District Court of Moscow, having satisfied the application of the First Deputy Prosecutor General Anatoly Razinkin, turned into state revenue a cryptocurrency estimated at almost $ 24 million, or 1 billion 600 million rubles, which, according to the investigation, the ex-head of the investigation department of the TFR Marat Tambiev received from the group hackers. The bribers got off with suspended sentences, and the recipient of the crypt, the access codes for which were stored in the Pension folder, faces a 15-year prison sentence.
The lawsuit filed by First Deputy Prosecutor General Anatoly Razinkin was considered by Judge Olga Kazakova. The first meeting actually did not take place due to the fact that it was not possible to establish a video link with the pre-trial detention center where Marat Tambiev is being held. At the second, documents of the prosecutor’s office were read out and the parties to the process were heard. At the third, the judge, after consulting with herself, ordered to turn 1032.1 bitcoins into the income of the Russian Federation, the value of which as of January 30, 2023 was equivalent to $ 23,980,843, or 1.662 billion rubles. at the then exchange rate of the Central Bank.
The amount turned out to be a record for bribes from the security forces – even ex-Colonel of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Dmitry Zakharchenko, who is serving a 16-year term, was proved to have received 1.4 billion rubles.
True, at the same time, assets estimated at 9 billion, which were clearly of illegal origin, were confiscated from him and his relatives.
The alleged bribe from Marat Tambiev was discovered by the investigators of the Main Investigative Committee of the ICR and the FSB, having searched as part of a criminal case under the corresponding part 6 of Art. 290 of the Criminal Code (taking a bribe on an especially large scale) his apartment on Bolshaya Ochakovskaya Street of the capital. The officer did not have large amounts of cash, expensive watches and jewelry, but an Apple MacBook Pro laptop was found, the contents of which the investigation received access to after a few months. In it, the investigators found a folder called “Pension”, in which there was a photograph of a sheet of paper with records of codes that allowed access to 932.1 and 100 bitcoins.
The Basmanny District Court, to which the Main Investigative Directorate of the ICR applied, as Kommersant reported, seized the cryptocurrency “by seizing and transferring” it to the email address of the crypto wallet located on the Ledger Nano X hardware wallet for cryptocurrencies. Then the investigator transferred the cryptocurrency to the wallet address, after which the hardware wallet with access keys to it was placed in the storage room for physical evidence of the TFR. After the entry into force of the decision of the Nikulinsky District Court, bailiffs will get access to bitcoins, who, obviously, will have to decide their future fate.
According to Kommersant, the court, following the Prosecutor General’s Office, justified the confiscation of bitcoins by the fact that they were of criminal origin, since Marat Tambiev had not previously reported that he had large sums, including in cryptocurrency, when submitting declarations.
Marat Tambiev served in the investigative bodies from December 2011, having gone from an investigator of the Gagarin inter-district investigative department to the head of the investigative department for the Tverskoy district of the capital’s Main Investigative Committee of the ICR. At the same time, his official income from service in the investigating authorities for all the years amounted to only 11.7 million rubles.
The criminal prosecution of members of the hacker group Infraud Organization Mark and Konstantin Bergmanov, as well as Kirill Samokutyaevsky, from whom the investigator received bitcoins for not seizing all their assets, in terms of giving a bribe through an intermediary lawyer, was discontinued.
For the sale of stolen bank card data on the dark web causing damage in the amount of more than 1 billion rubles. they are under Part 2 of Art. 187 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (illegal circulation of means of payment) received suspended sentences from two years and six months to three and a half years. The case was considered by the Tagansky District Court of Moscow in a special order in connection with the recognition by the defendants of their guilt and the conclusion of a deal with the prosecutor, under which they spoke about the facts of corruption by Marat Tambiev.
By the way, the district court turned the remaining bitcoins after the bribe, estimated at almost 700 million rubles, to the state from the convicts.
Marat Tambiev himself was fired from the investigating authorities for violating the oath and committing an act discrediting the honor of an employee of the TFR. The investigation of the criminal case, in which he faces a 15-year sentence and a fine of up to 500 million rubles, continues. He does not plead guilty to the crime.