Source He questioned the accusations against the CEO of the BPC. As it became known to Kommersant, in the center of public procedures “Business Against Corruption”, co-chaired by business ombudsman Boris Titov, an examination of materials relating to the investigation against the general director and beneficiary of the Baltic Industrial Company (BPK) Diana Kaledina was carried out. She is accused of fraud in the supply of equipment, including for the defense industry. Mr. Titov concluded that the criminal case “may cause unjustified damage to the Russian machine tool industry.” Meanwhile, the materials of the investigation from St. Petersburg were taken into consideration by the investigative department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
According to Kommersant's sources, the order to send to the Investigation Department (SD) the materials of almost a dozen criminal cases on especially large-scale fraud (part 4 of article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), in which Diana Kaledina appears, was received by St. Petersburg investigators in November, about a month later after the businesswoman was released from custody by a court decision, which was addressed by the investigator, who had shortly before insisted on her arrest. As a result, after checking the materials in the SD of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, they decided to transfer them to one of their investigators for production. Lawyer Ruslan Dolotov on this occasion expressed the hope that the central office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs will sort out all the nuances of this investigation and “make a reasonable and fair procedural decision.”
Recall that claims against Diana Kaledina arose at the end of last year, and the first criminal case was related to a contract concluded by BPC in 2016 with JSC Scientific and Production Enterprise Signal. According to investigators, Signal, contrary to the terms of the contract, was supplied with a machine with Chinese, not Russian, “stuffing”. After that, new similar episodes appeared in the investigation concerning various contracts totaling over 200 million rubles. At the same time, the court refused to arrest the accused. At some point, the investigators managed to get the “arrest” petition considered in another court, which granted the petition. However, not for long: the woman was released again at the request of the investigation (she was only forbidden to leave St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region). Apparently, the circumstance that representatives of a number of state corporations stated that they did not consider themselves victims of Mrs. Kaledina's actions also played a role. It is interesting that the motivation of the investigation both during the arrest of the businesswoman and during its cancellation concerned BOD contracts with enterprises, including the defense industry, but at the same time it was diametrically opposed. At first, the investigators claimed that the defendant would not fulfill the contracts, as she “disguises illegal actions under imaginary work on import substitution,” and then they stated that the arrest of Ms. Kaledina would disrupt the most important agreements during the implementation of the SVO in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the public council of the Center for Public Procedures “Business Against Corruption” (CPC BPC), co-chaired by Boris Titov, Commissioner for the Protection of the Rights of Entrepreneurs under the President of the Russian Federation, conducted its expertise regarding the investigation. “A criminal case against the BPC may cause unjustified damage to the Russian machine tool industry,” the business ombudsman concluded as a result. “Where does such an obsession come from to take Kaledina into custody? asks Anatoly Kucherena, another co-chairman of the COP BPC, in turn. “This is not a crime against a person, she didn’t kill anyone, she didn’t inflict bodily harm on anyone.” The experts of the COP BPC proposed not only to bring the discussion of the circumstances of the case to the interdepartmental working group under the Prosecutor General's Office, but also to evaluate the actions of the investigation for the indication of Art. 299 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (bringing a knowingly innocent person to criminal liability). “The situation with the BOD is simply replete with procedural violations,” Boris Titov believes. “Here is the initial violation of Part 1.1 of Art. 108 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which prohibits the arrest of entrepreneurs, and the substitution of one normative act for another, and the unconfirmed imputation of “damage” in the amount of the entire contract. According to him, in this case we are talking about one of the few representatives of the machine tool industry in Russia, which in the current situation is “critically important for the economy.” “To jeopardize the work of such an enterprise because of far-fetched accusations, in my opinion, is too dangerous today,” summed up Mr. Titov.
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