The court in Rostov-on-Don replaced the defendants in the criminal case on embezzlement during the construction of the Rostov-Arena stadium with suspended sentences for real ones. Among those convicted is the former deputy governor of the region Sergei Sidash. According to the decision of the court of appeal, he will have to spend four years in a general regime colony. Earlier, Sergei Sidash himself said that he did everything to prevent the construction of the stadium from being missed by the start of the championship, and would do it again.
The Rostov Regional Court re-examined complaints against the sentence of the Kirovsky District Court of Rostov handed down to the former deputy governor Sergei Sidash, as well as to the founder of Dontranshydromekhanizatsiya JSC Valentin Levanov and the general director of this company Andrey Androsov.
The appellate instance considered unreasonable the application by the court of first instance of Art. 73 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, which allows the defendants to be given a suspended sentence.
Now the official will have to spend four years in a penal colony, and entrepreneurs – six and five years, respectively. All three were taken into custody in the courtroom.
The court also satisfied the civil claim of the prosecutor’s office to recover jointly and severally from the convicts the damage caused by them to the Rostov region, in the amount of more than 80.7 million rubles. Almost 117.6 million rubles were additionally collected from Valentin Levanov and Andrey Androsov.
In October 2022, the Kirovsky District Court of Rostov found Sidash guilty of inciting abuse of power. Valentin Levanov and Andrey Androsov were found guilty of fraud.
According to investigators, the Dontranshydromechanization company supplied fine-grained sand to the construction site of the Rostov-Arena stadium instead of the higher-quality coarse-grained sand provided for by the project. The supplier was paid 474 million rubles, which, according to law enforcement officials, is 80.7 million rubles. more than the real cost of building materials.
Deputy Governor Sergei Sidash, who oversaw the construction of the stadium, was detained in May 2019. The official was accused of demanding, for career reasons, that the officials of the regional Ministry of Construction carry out construction work as soon as possible, without adjusting the estimate, taking into account the replacement of sand.
Sergei Sidash himself during the process insisted on his innocence.
He stated that he did not study the design estimates in detail, as he considered this the work of other government employees, in particular specialists in construction and drafting government contracts. The official said that his main task was to prevent the construction of the stadium from being missed by the start of the World Cup, and he did everything for this.
“If the same thing happened today, I would do everything in exactly the same way so as not to let down either the Rostov region or our regional government,” Sergey Sidash emphasized.
The Kirovsky District Court sentenced all three defendants to suspended sentences. The parties appealed the verdict. The defense insisted that the case should be dismissed, the prosecution asked for more severe punishments for the defendants. However, in December the Rostov Regional Court upheld the decision of the first instance.
Both lawyers and the prosecutor’s office appealed to the Fourth Court of Cassation and demanded that the regional court’s appeal ruling be cancelled. The Court of Cassation considered that during the previous consideration significant violations of the criminal procedure law had been committed. The instance left the complaints of the defense unsatisfied and agreed with the requirement of the prosecutor’s office, sending the case for a new trial to the appellate instance of the Rostov Regional Court.
“Naturally, we will appeal against the decision of the regional court on the real term in cassation,” Sergei Sidash’s lawyer, Alexander Polyansky, told Kommersant.
Note that the Rostov Regional Court for the third time in recent times, when re-considering cases on appeal, changes suspended sentences to real ones in high-profile cases against officials and security officials. So, initially the court upheld, and upon reconsideration, toughened the sentences of ex-mayor of Novocherkassk Igor Zyuzin and ex-prosecutor of the Proletarsky district of the Rostov region Sergey Kalitvintsev.
It is noteworthy that shortly before this, serious changes had taken place in the judicial system of the Rostov region – for example, the chairman of the court, Elena Zolotareva, who herself recently became a defendant in a criminal case on corruption, resigned. Also suspected of bribery and mediation in bribery were the current deputy chairman of the regional court Tatyana Yurova and the chairman of the Zheleznodorozhny district court of Rostov-on-Don Georgy Bondarenko.
