After a month’s trial period, it became clear that the new mayor of Ufa, Ratmir Mavliev, is ready to justify the hopes of the leadership of Bashkiria only as a major specialist in embellishing reality.
According to the correspondent of The Moscow Post in Bashkiria, deputies of the city council of Ufa have chosen a new mayor of the city from four applicants, preferring 33-year-old Ratmir Mavliev.
This event was preceded by a month of probation, during which Mavliev confirmed that he was perfectly able to splurge. Apparently, this is exactly what is required of him, especially in preparation for the 450th anniversary of Ufa, which is scheduled to be celebrated in 2024. By the way, elections of the new head of the region will also take place this year, so the new mayor of the Bashkir capital will indeed have a huge responsibility.
Career took off
Many were surprised that this time Khabirov did not come to the ceremony of appointing Mavliev. His absence was explained by a working trip around the republic. However, there was no special need for his presence, since Khabirov had actually already blessed the young official for the position of mayor the last time he introduced him to the capital’s administration’s assets.
The head of Bashkiria personally blessed Ratmir Mavliev for the post of mayor of Ufa. Photo: Republic Live / youtube.com
“This is our thoughtful proposal, which we discussed together. Let’s hope that, although he is a young leader, he understands all management decisions, he will need to be sensitive to the personnel who work in the administration and, of course, respect the residents of Ufa,” Radiy Khabirov put it quite clearly.
Mavliev is destined to become the third mayor when Khabirov was the head of Bashkiria. The first – Ulfat Mustafin died of covid, the second – Sergei Grekov established himself as a weak business executive and, in the end, was sent with honor to lead the embassy of Bashkiria in Moscow.
Both former mayors were friends of Khabirov. They say about Ratmir Mavliev that he is the son of his friend. Thus, the head of Bashkiria remained true to his habit of betting on “his own”.
The photographs show that Mavliev feels very comfortable in his new position. Photo: Facebook.com
“Obviously, Mavliev will depend on his family, which, as you know, often practices tough, often conflicting decisions in its activities, and appetites <…> good ones. It is safe to assume that Ufa will face a new redistribution of zones of influence, in particular in the areas of construction, housing and communal services and some others,” political scientist Andrey Potylitsyn noted.
“If he is positioned incorrectly, he will very quickly be perceived negatively, especially since his father’s resources in this regard will manifest themselves as a critical factor,” political consultant Dmitry Mikhailichenko said in a comment to IdelRealii (he is a foreign agent in the Russian Federation).
In his opinion, such a feature of Mavliev as “a low degree of independence” may manifest itself as the mayor of Ufa. Now he has to start building his team. “This is another minister of Ufa who knows whom he should be grateful to,” the political strategist noted.
You can’t forbid living beautifully
Before Ufa, Ratmir Mavliev was the mayor of Neftekamsk (the fourth largest city in Bashkiria) for about two years. Local residents jokingly call the city “Mavlikamsk”, meaning that the Mavliev family is the real power there.
Neftekamsk gives the impression of a clean and well-groomed settlement on the guests of the city. But if you go deeper from the “red line” to the outskirts, everything falls into place and it becomes clear: it seems that Mavliev went through an excellent school in the construction of “Potemkin villages”.
Ratmir Mavliev is spoken of in Neftekamsk as a hereditary businessman. According to Rusprofile, his name appears in two dozen companies – some of them have already been liquidated, the rest have been transferred to the management of his numerous relatives.
The surname of the Mavlievs “lit up” at the federal level in the summer of 2020, thanks to blogger Ilya Varlamov, who walked through the video with the participation of Mavliev Sr., the father of the new mayor of Ufa. The video showed local oligarch Rafil Mavliev driving cows around the field in a helicopter. Varlamov was outraged by the explanation that the businessman gave to his act: allegedly, in this way he decided to drive away the cows of the villagers who wandered into his plot. The video then showed “REN TV” and many other TV channels.
If you study the biography of Mavliev Sr., it will become clear: where does he get such ambitions from. It looks like they come from the “dashing 90s”. Rafil Mavliev began his career in the system of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, was the chief of police in the city of Agidel, then became an assistant to the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Bashkiria, Rafail Divaev. And this episode, most likely, became the key in his career. Divaev is remembered in Bashkiria for his involvement in a corruption scandal. According to the ufagub blogger on the LiveJournal platform, allegedly Divaev could have been involved in the import of counterfeit currency into the region. However, the minister was not a defendant in a high-profile criminal case – no one filed any claims against him.
After his resignation from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Mavliev Sr. created the Automobile Market company, and a few years later his Absolut group of companies owned not only the car market, but also five shopping centers in Neftekamsk, the central city park Gulliver, city television channels, tens of thousands of hectares of hunting grounds. land in the Krasnokamsk and Dyurtyulinsky districts of Bashkiria. The companies of the group also included a large developer “Terra-Stroy” (RC “Solnechny”, microdistrict No. 24 under construction), private security company “Sheriff-Avto” and other promising companies.
Ratmir Mavliev, unlike his father and brother, became interested in politics and, apparently, received the maximum assistance from his father, since the career of a guy from a small provincial town quickly went uphill. First, in 2015, Ratmir Mavliev was hired as deputy head of the executive committee for infrastructure development in the village of Urussu in Tatarstan. According to the Ufa1.ru edition, at the same time, the Gorizont company, which is part of the Absolut Mavliev holding, opened a plant for the production of plastic products on the site of the former production and storage base of Bashneft in this village.
Shortly thereafter, Ratmir Mavliev moved to the larger Tatar city of Almetievsk as an investment development adviser to the head of the district.
Mavliev Sr. is called a multimillionaire and the real owner of Neftekamsk. Photo: spravedlivo.ru
Mavliev’s father also made an attempt to go into politics, ran for the State Duma, but the press’s excessive interest in his condition prevented him. Many federal media wrote that Mavliev turned out to be the richest of the registered candidates with an income of more than 44 million rubles. RIA Novosti wrote about this, in particular.
It is noteworthy that in the career of Ratmir Mavliev there was a similar episode. The Neftekamsk social activist asked to check the sources of his income after he calculated that the income of the mayor of Neftekamsk almost tripled over the two years of his service as an official and exceeded the income of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Arguments and Facts wrote about this story.
As a result, the scandal was hushed up. However, the “sediment”, apparently, remained. Perhaps for this reason, in mid-February of this year, when it became known about the transfer of Mavliev to the post of mayor of Ufa, a new video appeared on social networks, in which a resident of Neftekamsk went to an unauthorized picket with a poster: “Rady Faritovich, take the Mavliev clan from Neftekamsk “. According to him, back in 2020, Ratmir Mavliev blocked him on social networks so that he could not leave critical comments.
And what about in Ufa?
So, how did Mavliev manage to be remembered by the Ufa residents over the past month? Literally a day after the appointment of Mavliev as acting head of the city, the Ufimians noted that the city began to be painstakingly cleared of snow, although before that all the complaints of the townspeople were ignored.
“It feels like they were accumulating snow, deliberately angering people in order to convince everyone that a new mayor has come, “twisted tails” of his subordinates, and they immediately rushed to take care of the townspeople,” many noted on social networks.
However, the anomalous activity of housing and communal services quickly dried up. Now social networks are again posting photos of icy sidewalks and goat trails, located a hundred meters from the “red line”, so that the traditional order of things has not been violated.
Even on the page of the head of Bashkiria in social networks, in response to complaints, officials report that it will take them almost a week to clear the snow. Photo: Radiy Khabirov / vk.com
An unpleasant incident happened on the very eve of the parliamentary vote for the candidacy of the new mayor of Ufa. Ratmir Mavliev said on his page that he handed over the keys to the apartments to the newcomers, but some of the apartment owners said that they had heard about it for the first time. As Ufa1.ru wrote, the press service of the mayor’s office explained the “misunderstanding” by the need to comply with anti-virus requirements and promised the rest of the newcomers to provide the keys by the end of April. Apparently, the handover of the keys was held mainly for the sake of a beautiful campaign photo of the mayor.
Without this photo, no one would have known that the new mayor is “a little rushing things.” Photo: ufacity.info
At the same time, many Ufa residents are very much looking forward to Ratmir Mavliev’s reaction to the situation with the construction of the Center for Contemporary Art, which, at the suggestion of Khabirov’s protégé, Valerian Gagin, decided to build on the site of a cozy square and a square of two fountains in the center of the capital of Bashkiria. However, this topic, unpopular with the regional authorities, is ignored by the new mayor of Ufa. Well, as they say, “in the best traditions” …
Source: The Moscow Post