Still would! The issue price is 250 million rubles, which in case of loss will have to be returned to the budget. We were interested in this story, because since October 2020, the REA has been headed by a person memorable to many Saratov residents – Alexei Kulapin.
Two decades ago, he became famous as the creator in Saratov of a citywide system of settlements and collection of payments from the population for housing and communal services. Today, the monthly transfer of money for utility bills has long become a routine, and in the early 2000s, the Municipal Unitary Enterprise “ERCC Saratov” was just making its way.
Kulapin immediately realized that the collection of payments is a non-dusty and profitable business. After all, the ERCC is not responsible for the quality of housing and communal services, they simply send out payments and accept financial flows into their accounts. And where there are streams, there is an opportunity to scoop from a full-flowing river. Firstly, the ERCC takes a certain percentage for the services, secondly, the collected money can not be immediately transferred to utility providers, but twisted a little in banks, thirdly, even contractors can be attracted to non-dusty work and pay them good fees from the collected funds .
In 2004, residents of three districts of Saratov received a single payment document ERCC, and these are 220 thousand personal accounts, gradually 2 more districts were added to them. It is quite possible that the then mayor Yury Aksenenko helped Kulapina to develop Saratov, but times have changed, and in 2006 completely different persons stood at the helm of the city.
Kulapina began to see off, and with a scandal. In 2006, while the head of the ERCC officially went on vacation, running for the City Duma, acting. Mayor Oleg Grishchenko put his man in the director’s chair. A conflict erupted. The doors of several ERCC payment acceptance points turned out to be welded, another part of the points was de-energized by the SPPP, the enterprise’s server was hacked, banks refused to make transactions until the conflict was resolved in court. The war ended on the order of the same Grishchenko, who on March 1 reinstated Aleksey Kulapin.
The returned boss tried to push through the City Duma a 1.6-fold increase in tariffs for the ERCC services, but failed. From December 1, 2006, Kulapin still had to leave the post of director of MUP ERCC. By order of the head of the city administration, he was fired in accordance with paragraph 13 of Art. 81 of the Labor Code “due to non-fulfillment of the terms of the employment contract.”
The creator of the unified system left several non-commercial partnerships as a legacy, where more than 200 employees of the ERCC were transferred. These partnerships sucked out the finances of the MUP, leaving it at a loss, the media wrote that their amount at the end of the year could reach 20 million rubles. Inspectors from the city administration came to the conclusion that up to five different enterprises that had nothing to do with the municipality were operating under the guise of a cash settlement center at the same time.
Then Aleksey Kulapin disappeared from the pages of the regional press altogether, and in 2011 he unexpectedly became deputy director of the Department of Energy Efficiency, Modernization and Development of the Fuel and Energy Complex of the Federal Ministry of Energy. In 2014, he rose to head of the Department of State Energy Policy of the Ministry of Energy of the Russian Federation. In 2015, at an important meeting at the Ministry for the Creation of the State Information System of the Fuel and Energy Complex (GIS FEC), Kulapin acted as a co-speaker together with Anatoly Tikhonov (at that time director of the Federal State Budgetary Institution Russian Energy Agency) and Igor Kozhukhovsky (Tikhonov’s deputy). Both co-rapporteurs are already sitting in prison cells, the first for fraud in the creation of the GIS for the fuel and energy complex, the second got burned on quotas for the supply of coal to Ukraine.
Kulapin took the dangerous chair of the head of the REA in 2020, when Tikhonov, already in the rank of Deputy Minister of Energy of the Russian Federation, came under investigation. At first, everything went smoothly: in 2021, the official even became Vice-Chairman of the Bureau of the UNECE Committee on Sustainable Energy and a representative of Russia’s interests on this site. Within the walls of the UN, Kulapin pushed a bombastic speech about preparing Russia for a global energy transition, low-carbon development and the fight against greenhouse gases. Not bad for a native of the outback, and even so loudly disgraced in provincial Saratov!
However, today, according to The Moscow Post, troubled days have come for the minion of fate. The Federal Treasury conducted an audit of the activities of the REA and revealed many violations. Now the department is demanding that the REA return a subsidy in the amount of almost 250 million rubles to the country’s budget. Details are disclosed in the decision of the Moscow arbitration, the trial was initiated by the REA under the leadership of Kulapin.
The Treasury checked the finances of the REA for the period from the beginning of 2019 to the middle of 2022 and revealed the incorrect use of OKVED codes (all-Russian classifier of types of economic activity). The chiefs of REA were mistaken in favor of more expensive codes, because of this, an overestimated amount of subsidy from the state budget was allocated to the department for salaries. The treasurers have already caught the agency on such a violation, as a result, more than 20 million rubles were returned to the budget. But this did not prevent the leaders of the structure from making a mistake again by almost 250 million!
In fairness, we note that not all of this volume refers to the period when the REA was headed by Alexei Kulapin, but even under him, the treasury counted a lot of budget “feats”. In February 2021, to calculate the salaries of REA employees, the grouping “Activities of head offices; consulting on management issues”, type of economic activity “Consulting on business and management issues”, while, according to the Federal Treasury, the grouping “Research and development” should have been applied, the economic activity code “Research and development in the field of natural and technical other sciences.
This led to an overestimation of the size of the target subsidy and the unjustified use of this subsidy by 5.4 million rubles. In the same month, the management of the REA again missed the codes, the mistake caused the misappropriation of a subsidy in the amount of 19.4 million. In April of the same 2021, according to the treasurers, manipulations with OKVED brought the agency “profit” by 25.7 million rubles and 41.1 million. Total – 91 million rubles.
Aleksey Kulapin is not going to put up with the conclusions of the Moscow arbitration. As the card file of the capital court shows, a complaint was recently sent to the appellate instance of the Moscow arbitration, on May 12.
Help “BV”. FGBU “Russian Energy Agency” (REA) of the Ministry of Energy of Russia was established in 1999. This is a unified state information and technical complex, consisting of a parent organization and branches – intersectoral territorial centers of scientific and technical information (TSNTI). The goal of the Agency is to implement the main provisions of the state policy in the fuel and energy complex, measures aimed at meeting the requirements of environmental and energy security, increasing the investment attractiveness of the Russian energy sector, and conducting research on the problems of scientific and technical development of the industrial and energy potential of the regions.
