Former assistant to the Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Arkady Dvorkovich Anastasia Alekseeva may face a real prison term for advancing the interests of the Medpolymerprom company associated with Eugene Spector, as well as R-Pharm and Promomed Rus. The state prosecution believes that her guilt in receiving bribes in the form of expensive trips to foreign resorts worth 5.7 million rubles has been fully proven.
The trial, the defendant of which is the former assistant to the Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Arkady Dvorkovich Anastasia Alekseeva, is coming to its logical conclusion. The Zamoskvoretsky Court of Moscow has been considering this case since December 2021. Dmitry Borisov, General Director of the Medpolymerprom company, is also one of his defendants. This is reported by the publication “Kommersant”.
Anastasia Alekseeva was charged with taking bribes (Article 290 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), and Borisov with their transfer (Article 291 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). The prosecutor stated that the guilt of both defendants was fully proven, and asked the court to sentence Alekseeva to 12 years in prison and a fine of 80 million rubles, and also to deprive her of a government award – the medal “For Services to the Fatherland” 2nd degree. As for Borisov, in his case, according to the public prosecutor, a fine of 80.5 million rubles will be enough. Apparently, such a difference between the punishments proposed by the prosecutor is due to the fact that Alekseeva refused to admit her guilt, while Borisov, on the contrary, fully admitted it.
As follows from the case file, not only Borisov, mentioned above, but also another person was involved in the transfer of bribes to Anastasia Alekseeva. This is an American Eugene (Eugene) Spector. The US citizen entered into a pre-trial cooperation agreement, after which he was convicted in a special order, sentenced to four years in prison. As part of the current trial, Spector appears as a witness for the prosecution.
The case reflects that Alekseeva and Spector were on close friendly terms, and he decided to use the connections to advance the interests of several pharmaceutical companies. One of them was the Medpolimerprom Group of Companies, where Spector was the head of the board of directors.
The Deputy Prime Minister’s assistant received bribes not in cash, but in the form of expensive trips to foreign resorts. Vouchers to Phuket and the Dominican Republic, the total cost of which exceeded 4.7 million rubles, are regarded by the investigation as one criminal episode. They were handed over to the ex-official in 2016. The third ticket – to Cyprus – worth about 1.1 million rubles was received by Alekseeva in 2017. It is considered as the second episode of the bribery case.
The first two vouchers were given to Dvorkovich’s former assistant in exchange for lobbying the interests of Promomed Rus and R-Pharm. The case file states that she was required to achieve amendments to Order No. 183 of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation of 2014. First of all, the businessmen were interested in the inclusion of Reduxin and Reduxin Light weight-loss preparations, which were produced by their firms, into the list subject to quantitative accounting. The essence of the problem lay in the composition of the drugs: it contained sibutramine and its analogues, which in a number of countries are equated with drugs and therefore prohibited for public sale.
As for the second episode, here Alekseeva was required to support the Medpolimerprom company. At that time, the company became the sole supplier of PVC medical products to public hospitals. In particular, in 2018, the company supplied PVC medical products worth 893 million rubles under government contracts. But already in December of this year, Medpolimerprom lost the corresponding preferences – this happened against the backdrop of numerous complaints from other manufacturers and proceedings in the Supreme Court.
The announcement of the verdict against Alekseeva and Borisov is scheduled for April 27.
