While Aleksey Teksler reports to the country’s leadership about the successes, corruption scandals do not subside in his team.
According to the correspondent MorningNewsthe prosecutor’s office of the Central District of Chelyabinsk approved the indictment in a criminal case against a former employee of the city administration, Sergei Reprintsev, accused of abuse of office.
The latter managed to work both under the current governor of the Chelyabinsk region Alexei Teksler, and under his no less scandalous predecessor Boris Dubrovsky
A distinctive feature of this story is the strange behavior of the defendants who operated with “fakes”, or rather, with documents of extremely dubious authenticity. Probably – in an effort to get more funds?
How to multiply by zero
“The first regional news agency” reports, according to investigators, in September 2019, the accused, acting as head of the Main Department of Architecture and Urban Planning of the Chelyabinsk city administration, without checking the availability and correctness of paperwork, as well as inspecting the facility, personally endorsed a draft permit for the commissioning of a shopping and entertainment complex along the street Voroshilov in the Kurchatov region. Subsequently, the organization registered the ownership of the specified object.
Sergei Reprintsev faces up to four years in prison
According to investigators, Sergey Reprintsev himself, the former head of the Chelyabinsk Regional Property Fund Polina Morozova and her ex-husband’s brother Alexander Graf were participants in the criminal scheme. Mr. Reprintsev is charged with illegally issuing a permit for the commissioning of an imaginary shopping mall, in place of which a prefabricated structure was installed.
As follows from the case file, in 2018 Polina Morozova and Alexander Graf decided to deceive them into taking possession of a land plot of 8.4 thousand square meters on Voroshilov Street in Chelyabinsk. The type of permitted use of this site is the placement of a shopping and entertainment complex with a single-level underground parking lot.
The cadastral value of the land is estimated at over 19 million rubles, it is owned by the state. The tenant of the plot in 2018 was the stepfather of Polina Morozova, the owner of Delta LLC. At her request, he assigned the right to lease the Perspektiva company owned by Alexander Graf.
In order to buy the land without bidding and at a price of 20% of the cadastral value, Morozova and Graf created the appearance of building a capital building – a shopping mall. We ordered a fuel dispenser project from a commercial company, received it and put it in a box. On the site they put a non-permanent metal building. Allegedly, Graf made fictitious documents about joining the networks and completed work on the construction of the shopping center. Through the cadastral engineer, the materials for which were allocated to a separate proceeding, the accomplices received a certificate for putting the facility into operation.
In September 2019, Sergey Reprintsev, deputy head of the main department of architecture and urban planning of the city hall, signed a permit to put the non-existent shopping mall into operation, without even bothering to check the correctness of the paperwork and the compliance of the facility with construction requirements.
Does the hand wash?
According to journalists 74.ruthe documents on the TRK project have already been transferred to the regional ministry of property and, perhaps, the defendants would have managed to disappear with the money if the employees of the FSB department for the Chelyabinsk region had not intervened.
A criminal case was opened against Sergei Reprintsev for abuse of power. Polina Morozova and Alexander Graf were charged with attempted fraud on a large scale, and in May last year the court sentenced them to two and a half years of suspended imprisonment. Both fully admitted their guilt.
Photo: Nail Fattakhov / Znak.com
Polina Morozova and her husband managed to build an almost “Potemkin village” in Chelyabinsk
Reprintsev stubbornly does not admit his guilt, although few people believe him. Chelyabinsk media writethat Reprintsev was an associate of the former mayor of Chelyabinsk, Yevgeny Teftelev, who was convicted for bribes and headed the city from 2014 to 2018. Reprintsev was appointed head of the main department of architecture of the administration of Chelyabinsk in 2017. After the reorganization of the structure in 2019, he became the head of the town planning and architecture committee of the city hall.
Having such work experience, he, in theory, could not goof off and certify the documentation for a non-existent shopping center. Another thing is that he could have his own “Interest” in this matter. He had known the same Polina Morozova for a long time, since she previously headed the Chelyabinsk Regional Property Fund and, by the way, acted as a lawyer for Yevgeny Teftelev for some time.
How to avoid a big scandal
Reprintsev managed to work both under the current governor Alexei Teksler and under his predecessor Dubrovsky, who, we recall, was a defendant in a criminal case on “road conspiracy”. I wrote about it in detail “Kommersant”.
Reprintsev left the post of his own free will in January 2020. By bureaucratic standards, in a year Texler, who arrived at the governor’s place straight from the post of first deputy of the federal head of the Ministry of Energy, might not have had time to “bite through” all the corrupt officials in the region.
He could even, during his business trips around the city, not pay attention to the metal shed in the place formally allocated for the construction of a shopping center. He might not even drive past it. You never know who, what and where is building …
But this does not mean at all that Texler should not be responsible for the actions of his subordinates, including Reprintsev and Co. It is quite possible that if the version of the investigation is confirmed, then he could even contribute to such behavior in the city administration. Moreover, this is not the only such story in the region.
A recent example is that in August 2021, the Accounts Chamber of the Chelyabinsk Region checked the department of affairs of the governor of the region, which, we recall, is engaged in ensuring the work of the entire government, servicing a complex of administrative and office buildings, cars, as well as three more institutions subordinate to the department.
According to the auditors’ report, the following violations were identified in the work of the department: excessive and fruitless spending of budgetary funds in the amount of 3.8 million rubles, diversion of budgetary funds into receivables for insurance premiums, violations of the procedure for remuneration of employees, resulting in an overpayment of several million more rubles.
Photo: gubernator74.ru
Governor Texler knows how to smile meaningfully
The auditors paid special attention to the purchases of managerial departments. In 2020, more than half of the contracts were concluded with a single supplier in the amount of more than 244 million rubles. The publication writes about it “Sign”.
In addition, attention was drawn to a number of separate contracts with extremely vague wording – in particular, for servicing official events, holding banquets commissioned by the regional government. In 2019, these works were carried out by the Malachite company (contract for 8.9 million rubles), in 2020 – by the Slavyanka hotel complex.
In total, during a random check of 26 purchases for a total of 68.9 million rubles, violations were revealed under eight contracts for a total of 4.5 million rubles.
In any other situation, in another region, proceedings would immediately begin – where do hundreds of millions of rubles go, why is competition not adequately ensured, as required by law? But not in Chelyabinsk. They decided to tritely “silence” the situation there, apparently hoping that new informational occasions – whether it be the coronavirus, or disturbing events in the Donbass – would interrupt the topic and everyone would forget about the conclusions of the Accounts Chamber.
Thinking out loud and not really
In the work of the governor, the main thing is to be able to put on a good face in a bad game and often make resonant statements. Texler clearly knows this skill better than many of his regional colleagues.
For example, in January of this year, at the Gaidar Forum in Moscow, Alexei Teksler made an interesting speech. According to the publication Ura.ruduring his speech at the section “Budget federalism”, he formulated the message: the decisions of the federal government form additional or new expenses for the regions, which would be nice to compensate from the same budget.
As a result, continued Alexey Teksler, “there is a decrease in the volume of investment spending by the regions.” The topic is not new and deserves a thorough discussion – in the context of a possible enlargement of regions for budget equalization, etc. But the Chelyabinsk governor did not go so far and dig deep. His main proposal was to provide the regions with compensation for these growing costs from the federal treasury. To put it simply: you are making costly decisions in Moscow, but we here, “on the earth of sin,” have nothing to carry them out.
Photo: gaidarforum.ru
Alexey Teksler (far left) clearly felt comfortable at the Gaidar Forum
Further, the idea that “the regions could fulfill the new plans of the federal center without asking for funds for them, but to the detriment of other projects (including social ones)” could well be implied. Of course, no one said this seditious thought aloud, but it was quite clearly reflected on the faces of many regional delegates present in the hall.
This is the time to remember the beautiful phrase, said not so long ago by the President of Russia Vladimir Putin, when he addressed the businessmen gathered at the SPIEF: “Don’t steal, behave decently and that’s it.” A little earlier, the head of state said about the same thing to officials, wrote about this “TVNZ”.
The meaning of what has been said is that the money stolen by the attackers would be quite enough to implement many necessary projects. This is especially true in the current economic situation. Is that just real?