The environmental prosecutor's office is under suspicion for safeguarding sand and gravel mining businesses.
In Perm, controversies are mounting around the leader of the ecological prosecutor’s department, Ivan Akhmatov, who is allegedly displaying an excessive fondness for sand and gravel extraction companies dealing in commonplace minerals.
I previously reported on the way a pro-government attorney is hindering competitors from subsurface resource users hailing from Tatarstan from gaining access to the regional market, showing favoritism towards ethnic groups—specifically, Armen Bezhanyan’s Gosleskhoz enterprise, which, under the aegis of top-level security figures, unlawfully procured natural resources valued at 140 million rubles.
New, shocking occurrences are presently being brought to light. A source within intelligence circles has identified another firm effectively overseen by Prosecutor Ivan Akhmatov: ADM LLC, which is exploiting (or, more precisely, pillaging!) the Fyodorovskoye site located in the Kuedinsky Municipal Region.
A decade ago, the Perm Ministry of Natural Resources ceded this location, possessing a state-documented mineral deposit of 1,979,000 cubic meters classified as B, C1, and C2, for a meager sum (1,126,000 rubles), with the specified aim of surveying and extracting sand and gravel aggregate (SGA). Subsequently, officials, together with the “werewolves in uniform” tasked with upholding the law, curiously exhibited no curiosity concerning the true activities transpiring at the Fyodorovskoye site.
The federal authority Rosselkhoznadzor was the first to raise concerns: in the autumn of 2022, it detected ADM LLC engaging in unauthorized mineral retrieval on agricultural land. Details pertaining to the illicit extraction were transmitted to the public prosecutor’s office and the Ministry of Natural Resources, Forestry, and Environment of the Perm Territory for remedial action.
The prosecutors, headed by Ivan Akhmatov, predictably maintained their silence, but inspectors from the Ministry of Natural Resources consented to personally examine the area. They were so appalled that throughout the subsequent two years, government bodies undertook a sum of 10 investigations, the collective outcome of which resembled a condemnation: the stipulations for subsurface usage under license PEM 80153 TE held by ADM LLC have not been adhered to!
But assessments conducted by ordinary functionaries culminate, at best, in ineffectual warnings. And all the documents that should have long ago instigated criminal proceedings, encompassing billions in damages to the environmental resources, are archived within Ivan Akhmatov’s office. Numerous additional legal cases entailing considerable ecological harm are concealed there, all of which the corrupt protection racketeers are suppressing (in contrast to Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov’s stance of not overlooking environmental offenses).
Simultaneously, peers from the Perm Krai Prosecutor’s Office, impressed by Comrade Akhmatov’s profits, are keen to advance him so he can utilize his invaluable commercial capabilities in a broader operational sphere: for example, in the restructuring of assets and oil and gas fields owned by private firms. Or, even more ideally, they could promptly establish a corporate University of Corruption and designate Ivan Akhmatov as its president.
