Billionaire Mikhail Medvedev is looking for a roof in St. Petersburg

Another corruption scandal flared up in St. Petersburg: Sergey Shalygin, deputy chairman of the Leningrad Region Construction Committee, got burned on a bribe. He was detained at the time of the transfer of money from the Unit Construction Company, which performs a number of major contracts for the government of the region and St. Petersburg.

According to investigators, Sergei Shalygin promised the co-owner of the company, Alexei Bobrov, for money, patronage in concluding contracts with organizations subordinate to the Committee. Threads from Bobrov may lead to other major interests, among which may be a major construction businessman Mikhail Medvedev and officials of the Leningrad region.

Details – in the material of the correspondent of The Moscow Post in the Leningrad region.

It is hard to believe that the Deputy Chairman of the Construction Committee could take bribes, and his immediate supervisor, Chairman of the Committee Konstantin Pankratiev was neither a dream nor a spirit. So far, the security forces have no complaints against him. Bye.

At the same time, just a few hours before the detention of Shalygin, his boss Pankratiev suddenly quit. The head of another committee, on the fuel and energy complex, Yuri Andreev, did exactly the same.

At the same time, Yuri Andreev is already in custody for taking a bribe. He was arrested on December 8th. The Investigative Committee charges him with allegedly instructing Pavel Dudkevich, director of the Center for Energy Saving and Energy Efficiency in the Leningrad Region, to receive money from contractors that carried out work under the program Energy Saving and Energy Efficiency in the Leningrad Region. 47news.ru writes about it.

This looks like a real corruption bacchanalia in the government of Governor Alexander Drozdenko. It is possible that the detention of Sergei Shalygin will be followed by possible claims against Pankratiev, who “retired” from his post. Or even to the head of the region?

For the last three years before his appointment in 2018, Konstantin Pankratiev worked at the Construction Department of the Leningrad Region, and even earlier, in the structures of Vladimir Arteev’s Uniform Solutions Group. The latter was detained back in 2017 on charges of fraudulent embezzlement of budget funds allocated for the construction of a children’s music school.

Pankratiev’s predecessor, Vitaly Zhdanov, was dismissed from his post a few months before Pankratiev’s appointment, in May 2018. A few days later, Zhdanov was arrested on suspicion of fraud on an especially large scale. This was written by “Kommersant”.

The reason for the start of the investigation was the embezzlement of budget funds during the construction of the St. Petersburg School of Arts back in 2012. Then Zhdanov was the first deputy chairman of the St. Petersburg Construction Committee. And the state contract for this construction was concluded with a company affiliated with the Uniform Solutions Group. So, it seems that Pankratiev and Zhdanov are one and the same, it’s just that the latter was less fortunate at that moment.

At the same time, it is interesting where Shalygin, the detained deputy Pankratiev, came to power in the Leningrad region in 2016. Prior to that, he served as General Director of TIR LLC. The latter was also included in the Arteevsk Group of Companies “Unified Solutions”.

“TIR” was engaged in the demolition of buildings. It is believed that this is a very dirty business area, where you need to have an iron grip. Less than two years later, the structure was liquidated with losses and a negative value of assets.

The same fate later befell the direct owner of Status LLC, whose CEO in 2014 was the above-mentioned Vladimir Arteev. Only “Status” was liquidated due to inaccurate information about the head and legal address – apparently, it was just a “pad” for transferring funds.

“Intermediary” Bobrov

As for SK Unit, on a bribe from which Sergei Shalygin got burned, the company is a fairly large construction contractor both in the Leningrad Region and in St. Petersburg. The amount of its state contracts exceeds 5.4 billion rubles. The largest customer just from the Leningrad region is the Administration of the Priozersky Municipal District (1.1 billion rubles).

In second place is JSC “Admiralty Shipyards”, which is part of the United Shipbuilding Corporation (USC) under the leadership of Alexei Rakhmanov. “SK Unit” fulfills the contract for the completion of the construction of spans in shop No. 12. And then – again the Leningrad region, which was supervised by Pankratiev and Shalygin – the Administration of the Lodeynopolsky Municipal District (564 million) and others.

At the same time, the company ended up with a whole series of contracts, the execution of which, for some reason, has not been closed. For example, a contract for the construction of a site for a modular building from the Sredne-Nevsky Shipbuilding Plant, which was to be completed in November 2015.

Or a contract for the repair of pavement on the territory of the same plant for 1.6 billion rubles, which should have been completed back in 2016. Judging by the data of the Rusprofile information service, the contract is still in the execution stage. It turns out that the company made a delay of more than six years? There are many more such examples.

As stated, the bribe was supposed to be transferred by the co-owner of SK Unit, Alexei Bobrov. He has 50% in the company. It is unlikely that his partner Dmitry Kravtsov, with whom they own the company on an equal footing, was not aware of the situation. But something else is interesting: until 2016, Alexei Bobrov served as general director in another construction company – Neva-Stroy LLC.

LLC “Neva – Stroy” also has a number of large government contracts, although not on such a scale as “SK Unit”. Their total volume is 58.4 million rubles. The largest customer is the MKU “Department of Housing and Communal Services and Provisions”.

The road leads to the CDS

But “Neva-Stroy” is not interesting in itself, it is part of, or at least was part of a larger organization – the construction group CDS, known for the construction of large residential complexes in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region.

Its owner and general director is billionaire Mikhail Medvedev, whom evil tongues tried to ascribe kinship almost with the Deputy Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, although this is hardly true. But the scandals around the CDS are more than real.

Among other things, the CDS built up Murino in the Leningrad Region. In 2017, the roof of the gym collapsed in the school under construction in the residential complex “New Murino”, the project of which was carried out by the CDS company. Then 55-year-old Yuri Trofimov, the compressor unit operator, died, but there could have been many more victims. The workers were saved by the fact that it was lunch time, most of them were not on site. This story was written by 47news.ru.

The head of the CDS, Mikhail Medvedev, immediately, after only half an hour, tried to push the responsibility away: supposedly, according to preliminary data, the supplier of the structures could be at fault in what happened. Allegedly, there are doubts about their quality. Note that in the end, both Medvedev and the CDS came out of history without any problems. And less than a year later, another major project was announced – the construction of a 20-storey residential complex in the Nevsky district of St. Petersburg.

One gets the impression that the CDS and personally Medvedev may have a good roof. And both in the government of the Leningrad region, and in Smolny.

At the same time, migrants without documents and qualifications can work at the construction sites of the CDS. In 2015, a high-profile criminal story flared up with the execution of a police lieutenant colonel and his subordinates. It turned out that the police were engaged in cash collection – they transported money for illegal migrants who worked at the construction sites of the CDS company. Life.ru writes about this story.

There is no reason to believe that after that incident, as well as after the collapse of the roof in the gym in Murino, this practice, if any, ceased. At the same time, attempts to reveal the ins and outs of the CDS and Medvedev himself run into stiff resistance from time to time.

According to “V krizis.ru”, at least earlier, Mr. Medvedev moved around the city in a black Maybach 57 with a license plate of the “traffic cops” series, and the traffic police inspectors introduced himself as Dmitry Medvedev’s brother. Although it is known that Medvedev is the only child in the family.

And in response to attempts to find out in the CDS itself whether Mikhail Medvedev is a relative of a well-known official, Alexander Shalnov, deputy director for advertising and public relations, promised to “shoot” the editor-in-chief of the publication and bury the caller.

Amazing agility and self-confidence. Could it really be given by possible dubious connections with officials of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region?