The ex-deputy of the Saratov Regional Duma was fined 40 thousand rubles. for forgery of documents
Sergey Kurikhin fraudulently extended the permit for the storage of weapons. The ex-deputy of the Saratov Regional Duma from United Russia, accused of using a fake document for weapons, was sentenced to a criminal fine of 40,000 rubles. This decision was announced today, on January 25, by the justice of the peace of the court district No. 4 of the Kirovsky district, Alexander Solodovnikov.
The presiding judge found the former member of the Legislative Assembly guilty under Part 5 of Article 327 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. According to the investigative committee, Kurikhin submitted a fake act of inspection of the provision of conditions for the storage of weapons and ammunition, thanks to which he extended his permit for eight weapons.
The basis of the case was the forgery of documents on the storage of weapons, which Kurikhin presented, according to the state prosecution, in order to hide his mansion in Ust-Kurdyum in the declaration of income and property. This was one of the reasons for depriving him of his parliamentary mandate.
The case turned out to be complicated and concerned checks on the storage of weapons at two addresses: in an apartment on Lermontov Street and in a house in Ust-Kurdyum. The defense insisted that an audit had been carried out, but the evidence suggested otherwise. The examination showed that other people, and not the persons responsible for this, filled out the documents on checking weapons. Moreover, inconsistencies were noted in the documents themselves, for example, the parameters of the safes did not correspond to the actual ones. Appeals to the police showed that no applications for weapons checks were received. The prosecution considered that in reality the verification procedures were not carried out.
Prior to the meeting, the ex-deputy showed confidence, joked and was in a good mood. However, his behavior changed dramatically when the verdict was announced. There was a moment when he rolled his eyes or approached a nearby wall and looked at something there. Perhaps Kurikhin believed in his impunity to the end. But the court seemed to surprise him.
The safe for storing weapons has already become a pretext for deputies of the regional duma to deprive Mr. Kurikhin of his powers as a deputy of the regional duma last year on the grounds that he provided deliberately incorrect information about property to the legislative assembly. An audit by the regional prosecutor’s office showed that he did not indicate in the declaration for 2020 information about the presence of a residential building in his use. Mr. Kurikhin himself admitted that this was his mother’s house, in which his children lived for several months. In this house there was a safe for weapons, registered to Sergei Kurikhin. Since the law requires the owner to have access to the safe, the prosecutor’s office, which conducted the verification of the implementation of the law, came to the conclusion that he had access to the premises as the owner, which means that the deputy had to indicate it as an object in use.
In addition, the prosecutor’s office drew attention to the fact that Mr. Kurikhin used his deputy status for personal interests: he used the deputy request form to apply to law enforcement agencies in administrative and criminal cases in which he is one of the participants. The parliamentarian claimed that he sent the appeals precisely as a deputy, as he was convinced that he was under pressure in connection with his deputy activities.
During the entire preliminary investigation and trial, the defendant did not admit his guilt and asked to be acquitted, and also stated about the biased attitude and illegal actions on the part of law enforcement agencies.
Sergei Kurikhin’s mansion in Ust-Kurdyum
The state prosecution asked for Sergei Kurikhin to be sentenced to 480 hours of compulsory work. On December 15, 2020, Sergei Kurikhin was expelled from ER. Ivan Dzyuban, the then leader of the ER faction in the regional Duma, explained that the party decided to consider the expulsion of Kurikhin, relying on the decision of the Frunzensky District Court of November 11, 2020 to terminate the criminal case and criminal prosecution against journalist Sergei Vilkov, accused of libel on Deputy Sergei Kurikhin. The subject of the proceedings was a publication on the social networks of a journalist, which dealt with the possible criminal past of the politician. Kurikhin did not wait to be expelled, and he wrote a statement about leaving the United Russia.
Last year, Kurikhin was deprived of his deputy mandate, after which journalists wrote about his departure to Europe. The first court of cassation recognized Kurikhin’s deprivation of the deputy mandate of the regional duma as legal.
Kurikhin is the deputy editor-in-chief of the Vzglyad-info news agency. At the same time, he himself became the hero of the federal TV channel “Russia 24”. In November 2021, Sergei Kurikhin spent more than three hours under interrogation at the economic security department of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Saratov Region.
Kurikhin’s common-law wife was suspected of tax evasion for 21.8 million rubles.
Now several criminal cases are being investigated in Saratov, the defendants in which are connected with Sergei Kurikhin or could act in his interests. He himself is a witness in all these cases. In particular, the case against the common-law wife of Sergei Kurikhin, Maria Goncharova, is being investigated: she is suspected of tax evasion in the amount of 21.8 million rubles. The investigation believes that from January 2018 to February 2021, the woman provided tax returns with false information about the profit received from the sale of apartments.
The case against the former member of the public chamber of the Saratov region Ksenia Kornilova and entrepreneurs Vadim Baldin and Mikhail Panteleev are also being investigated. They are suspected of organizing the deliberate bankruptcy of Mikhail Panteleev.
According to the security forces, in 2018, unidentified employees of Sargrad JSC, owned by Sergey Kurikhin, and Ksenia Kornilova, head of Consulting-PRO LLC, produced fictitious documents confirming that the individual entrepreneur Mikhail Panteleev, whose accounting was handled by Consulting-Pro PRO”, debt under a loan agreement to Vadim Baldin in the amount of more than 60 million rubles. These actions, as the investigation believes, caused the inability of Mikhail Panteleev to satisfy the requirements of banks for 60 million rubles. Ksenia Kornilova worked as an assistant to Sergei Kurikhin in the regional Duma.
According to the official declaration, the income of deputy Sergei Kurikhin, who left United Russia, fell in 2020 and amounted to 5.3 million rubles. A year earlier, he declared 5.5 million rubles. He owned five land plots, two apartments, and shares in seven non-residential premises. In the declaration for last year, the deputy already indicated four minor children (a year earlier there were three), two of whom own shares in one apartment. The deputy assured that he had no wife.
In addition, the Supreme Court is now considering a complaint from the mother of Sergei Kurikhin, businesswoman Nadezhda Shilovskaya. She was the customer for the construction of a gallery on Oktyabrskaya Street on a land plot that previously belonged to the Fedin Museum. As a result, a restaurant was built instead of a gallery. At the end of November 2021, the regional government filed a lawsuit demanding that the restaurant be recognized as an illegal building and demolished. The Saratov Arbitration Court united the claims for the return of the land to the Fedin Museum and the demolition of the restaurant on it, and then decided to demolish the building, which was upheld by the appellate and cassation instances.
The Territorial Administration of the Federal Property Management Agency also filed a lawsuit with the Arbitration Court of the Saratov Region to recover several real estate objects associated with the infamous Kashtan Gallery in the regional center (Vavilova, 6) from illegal possession into state ownership. The Federal Property Management Agency considers it illegal for an individual entrepreneur Nadezhda Shilovskaya to own a part of the Chestnut building.
