In Kamchatka, the court freed Igor Redkin, a former deputy of the local Legislative Assembly and a member of the Forbes list, who shot a man, from criminal prosecution. The prosecutor’s office tried to bring one of the richest people in Russia to justice, but all efforts were useless.
The state of emergency, which caused a great resonance in the region, happened in the summer of 2021. On the night of August 2 in the village. Ozernovsky was shot dead by 30-year-old Andrei Tolstopyatov – together with a relative, he collected scrap metal at a landfill. The bullet hit the man in the stomach, he died on the spot. The police opened a criminal case, the outcome of which looked obvious – as you know, all owners of rifled hunting weapons are registered, and the cartridges for them are fired and fall into the bullet casing, which makes it easy to establish the owner of the rifle. Probably for this reason, a few days after the incident, Igor Redkin, a deputy of the regional Legislative Assembly, who was preparing to go to the polls again, turned himself in to the police with a confession. Outside the region, Redkin is known as a co-owner of the Vityaz-Avto fishing company, the Vityaz-Aero airline, and a number of other enterprises.
Soon, the lawyers of the fish tycoon published an appeal in the press on behalf of their client. In it, Redkin reported that in the evening he learned that a bear was roaming the outskirts of the village. Worried about the wild animal not attacking people, he boarded an all-terrain vehicle in search of a beast to scare it away. Hearing a noise in the landfill, Redkin, according to him, fired a shot. After that, he left and only later found out that the target was not a bear, but a man.
However, the version presented by Redkin looked like a coat swept on a “live” thread. First of all, they paid attention to the fact that not a single hunter would leave before he made sure where he was at all. Moreover, as the media clarified, Redkin did not shoot from an ancient Berdanka, but from an imported carbine with a thermal imager sight worth almost a million rubles. Therefore, it is possible that Redkin could have known from the very beginning that he had committed the murder. And if so, then we can assume that he simply left the wounded man to die. In addition, the story itself about the bear that allegedly came to the village looked doubtful. According to KAMCHATKA-INFORM, on the evening of August 2, the villagers saw a drunken Redkin, who was amused by driving around the village with a carbine at the ready. As a result, the situation appeared in a completely different light.
Apparently realizing this, the local branch of United Russia expelled him from the party, and the court placed Redkin in a pre-trial detention center on charges of murder. However, two days later he was transferred to house arrest. Then the article of the charge was reclassified to manslaughter, and even later – to causing death by negligence. Thus, the maximum possible sentence for Redkin “moved” from 15 years to 2. As a result, last summer, the Ust-Bolsheretsky District Court found Redkin guilty of accidental murder, as well as illegal hunting for a bear, and sentenced him to a year of restriction of freedom. The prosecutor’s office, considering the sentence too lenient, appealed against the decision, after which the case went for a new trial. However, during the process that began anew, the court announced that there were no more claims against Redkin from the side of the law, since the relatives of the deceased announced reconciliation with the defendant. In addition, Redkin paid a fine for illegal hunting. Given the positive characterization of the defendant, his remorse and the absence of a criminal record, the court ruled to terminate the criminal prosecution. The prosecutor’s office tried to appeal this decision, but the regional court upheld it. The change affected only physical evidence – a carbine and a thermal imaging sight, which the court decided to confiscate.
According to media reports, reconciliation with relatives of the deceased villager cost Redkin 30 million rubles: Tolstopyatov’s mother received 10 million rubles, his widow received 20 million. At first glance, the amounts may seem substantial. As lawyers noted several years ago, the average amount of compensation for moral damage for the death of a loved one is 111 thousand rubles, and the median is 70 thousand rubles, cases when the court orders millions of payments are extremely rare. However, everything is relative. In 2019, Igor Redkin took 9th place in the Forbes ranking with an income of 1.44 billion rubles. In 2020, he moved to 20th place with 715.72 million rubles. It turns out that the owner of such capital can try to negotiate reconciliation with the relatives of 23 people?
By the way
This is not the first such case. In the fall of 2017, the chief federal inspector for the Yaroslavl region and a member of the regional qualifying judging panel, Vasily Nesvetailov, violated the rules of hunting and shot the huntsman. A case was initiated against him under Part 1 of Art. 109 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation “Causing death by negligence”. However, Nesvetailov was released from criminal liability, since he compensated for the material damage caused to the family of the deceased.
Also in September 2021, the court released Alexander Korkin, deputy of the Legislative Assembly of the Sverdlovsk Region, from liability for the negligent murder of a deputy of the Legislative Assembly of the Sverdlovsk Region – while riding a boat with a shot from a hunting rifle, he shot his fellow traveler in the head. First, Korkin was sentenced to a one-year prison term, but the victims contested the verdict. During the retrial, Korkin declared his illness, which caused the hearing to be suspended. The lawyer for the family of the victims warned that the statute of limitations in the case would expire and if the trial was not resumed, the sentence would be automatically canceled and Korkin would be considered not convicted. And so it happened.
