On March 22, the Khamovnichesky Court of Moscow completed consideration of the criminal case against the former leaders of the All-Russian Society of the Deaf. He considered proven the position of the prosecution, according to which Valery Rukhledev and two of his accomplices deprived the organization of assets for 320 million rubles. Since 2016, “Version” has covered this story in the series of investigations “How to do business with people with disabilities.” Today is the time to recall its key episodes.
Until the last moment, Valery Rukhledev, the former president of the All-Russian Society of the Deaf (VOG), was under a ban on certain actions. Today he was arrested in the courtroom and taken into custody. The Khamovnichesky District Court of Moscow sentenced him to 7 years in prison. Former VOG chief lawyer Yevgeny Novoseltsev and head of the company’s finance department Tatyana Zembatova were sentenced to 6.5 m and 4.5 years in prison. Earlier, the prosecutor asked the court to appoint Rukhledev and Novoseltsev 8 years in prison, Zembatova – 5 years.
The state prosecutor also demanded that each of the defendants be fined 1 million rubles, but the court did not satisfy this demand. According to three civil suits of the victims, among which the VOG itself appears, 569 million rubles were jointly and severally recovered from Rukhledev, Novoseltsev and Zembatova.
A criminal case against the former head of the VOG was initiated in 2018. However, scandals over the redistribution of cash flows and property began to shake the country’s largest organization for the hearing impaired much earlier.
The turbulent 1990s
In March 1997, the Council for the Affairs of the Disabled under the President of the Russian Federation met specifically to investigate “the situation around the All-Russian Society of the Deaf.” It turned out that during the period of the presidential decrees on benefits, the commercial partners of the VOG “digested contracts” for 160-180 million dollars. At the same time, the society received only about 10 billion non-denominated rubles directly from these amounts. At the exchange rate of that time, the amount is very modest, and, as it turned out, it was transferred to the VOG as … sponsorship.
A year earlier, the All-Russian Society of the Deaf was talked about in connection with a high-profile series of murders that are associated with the criminal world. The victims were the chairman of the Moscow Society of the Deaf, Igor Abramov, the commercial partners of the VOG, Vladimir Orlov and Magomed Musaev (vice-presidents of the ITF and Open World firms), and most importantly, the current president of the VOG, Valery Korablinov, a deaf-mute former wrestler. Valery Rukhledev at that time was the first deputy of Korablinov and the chairman of the Russian Sports Union of the Deaf.
After the change of leadership, society began to actively get rid of the property received in Moscow and the regions back in Soviet times. In a matter of years, hundreds of objects were sold all over Russia, as allegedly “unprofitable”, and at a price clearly below the market.
Total sale
“Version” spoke in detail about how the Nizhny Novgorod cultural center “Zvezda” was sold in March 2012 to a certain OOO “Meridian” with subsequent reconstruction into a shopping center. In return, the Regional Society of the Deaf was bought new premises, only the area of \u200b\u200bthe Zvezda was 2 thousand square meters, and the new areas, located at different addresses, totaled only 168 square meters. The difference from the sale went to Moscow. Similarly, in Nizhny Novgorod, the property of a social rehabilitation enterprise that employed deaf people was also sold. It turned out that the factory was corporatized, but the workers did not get a single share, all of them, as they all said in the same Nizhny Novgorod VOG, went to Moscow.
In the capital itself, the story of the eviction of the Yuventa publishing house and the editorial office of the AIDS-Info newspaper, whose parent organization rented part of the building at the address: Moscow, st. 1905, d. 10a, p. 1 until December 31, 2025. However, the leadership of the VOG, without clear explanations, demanded that the tenants vacate the premises ahead of schedule. On specialized sites, there were already announcements about the sale of the building for almost 1 billion rubles.
According to the site gluxix.net, such transactions took place with the participation of Center for Real Estate LLC, created specifically so that the All-Russian Society of the Deaf does not appear in numerous commercial transactions. At the same time, VOG became the sole founder of the Center, and the authorized capital of the company was the buildings of former social rehabilitation centers in large cities of the country (Volgograd, Kaliningrad, Nizhny Tagil, Krasnodar, Smolensk, Cheboksary), and land plots under them.
sincere confession
Each major transaction of the VOG caused a great resonance among the rank and file members of the organization. In 2018, on suspicion of particularly large-scale fraud, law enforcement agencies detained Yevgeny Novoseltsev. The chief lawyer of the society of the deaf combined this work with the management of the subsidiary Vilart Investments LLC, which also participated in transactions for the sale of “non-core” assets of the VOG. Novoseltsev confessed to the episodes with the amount of damage of 150 million rubles and agreed to cooperate with the investigation. Later, the criminal case was reclassified from fraud (part 4 of article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) to embezzlement on an especially large scale (part 4 of article 160 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). Law enforcement agencies charged Valery Rukhledev and Tatyana Zembatova, the amount of damage in the case increased to 320 million rubles.
Valery Rukhledev maintained his innocence. According to his version, the criminal prosecution was initiated by some ill-wishers who sought to change the leadership of the VOG. It is likely that the defense of the former president of the organization will appeal against today’s verdict of the Khamovniki court.