“Black” lumberjacks are burning Russia
The lion’s share of forest fires is associated with “black” lumberjacks, who thus cover up the traces of illegal logging. The recent fire in Sosva may be another confirmation of this. At the epicenter of the fire was a sawmill, presumably working “under the black flag.”
A huge fire in the village of Sosva, Sverdlovsk region, blazed from 25 to 27 April. As a result, 2 people died, 116 houses burned down. Locals say that the fire came to the village from the industrial zone, in which sawmills work from morning to night.
Black and fluffy
In hot pursuit, the manager of one of the sawmills, a 29-year-old Gazanfar Mammadov. At the same sawmill, his sister worked as an accountant. Samila Mammadovaand their father is called the owner of the micro-enterprise by the media Nigita Mammadova. They themselves deny their involvement in the fire, turning the arrows to a neighbor – an IP sawmill Ditkovsky.
What’s interesting here is this. Gazanfar Mammadov claims that he has contracts with one of the local boiler houses for waste disposal and his sawmill does not burn anything. In this regard, it is interesting to whom the contracts are drawn up. “Our Version” studied the databases of individual entrepreneurs and legal entities, and this is what turned out. None of the named members of the Mamedov family appeared in the registers of individual entrepreneurs or founders of the LLC. True, there is someone in the village of Sosva Fahraddin Mammadov. He established two legal entities for the wholesale trade of timber – Uralprombaza LLC and Uralprombaza-S LLC. But both of them were liquidated in 2017. It turns out that the sawmill has been operating “under a black flag” for the past few years? A video that Gazanfar Mammadov managed to record before his arrest was circulated on the Web. From it it is clear that until 2020 he worked in law enforcement agencies, then he began to manage a sawmill. If so, then we can assume for what reason there were no questions from the inspectors about his enterprise – old connections could well help in this.
Apparently, it was no coincidence that the first thing the investigation detained was the municipal employee responsible for fire safety. Although, if the Mamedovs’ sawmill really worked “underhand”, then a good lawyer will easily justify the innocence of the detainee. Formally, he simply had no legal grounds to go to the Mammadovs with checks: no legal entity – no checks. But in this story there is something to ask the head of the village Gennady Makarov. It seems that he himself felt this and in early May wrote a letter of resignation.
Governor Kuyvashev does not burn
Makarov can become that switchman, on whom, as a result, the regional authorities will hang all the dogs about the fire. If not in a criminal sense, then in a political sense. Although in fact the problem is wider and has at least an inter-regional scale. The work of the forest industry in the Sverdlovsk region, where since 2012 he has been governor Evgeny Kuyvashevhas been questioning for a long time. One of them is the dominance of “black” entrepreneurs.
A fire at a semi-legal sawmill is quite an ordinary event for the Sverdlovsk region, the case in Sosva received media attention due to the victims and the large scale of destruction. Although the region has already experienced grandiose fires that occurred according to the same pattern. For example, in May 2021, firefighters worked all night on Uchitelei Street in the regional center of Yekaterinburg, where a sawmill and building materials warehouses were on fire. 16 buildings were damaged, including 10 residential buildings, people lost their homes. It is known that the victims were going to recover damages from the owners of the sawmill. But here’s the problem: the legal entity Snabstroyles, on behalf of which checks were issued to customers at the sawmill, turned out to be liquidated long ago.
Thus, emergencies help to reveal a picture that is inconvenient for the regional authorities: logging, processing and sale often goes “under the black flag”. Sometimes this results not only in damage to nature and the state budget, but also in human casualties.
However, the border between legal and illegal business in the forest, apparently, is very blurred. About three years ago, Nasha Versiya wrote about how the Krasnoyarsk Construction Center LLC in the Krasnoyarsk Territory cut wood in the status of a priority investment project executor.
To do this, a section closed from prying eyes was created in the taiga, where even journalists were not allowed.
Priority projects
The priority investment project scheme seems to be quite popular in the industry. A few years ago, the industrial site of Sosva-Les LLC received the same status. It was assumed that the company, established by the former director of the Sosvinsky woodworking plant Rustam Javadov, for borrowed 500 million rubles, modernizes timber processing production. Under this case, the regional authorities allocated additional raw material base to the companies on preferential terms without competition. However, in 2020, Sosva-Les workers were caught illegally logging, Octagon reported. The company’s management said that the trees were cut down by mistake, and the inspectors were too strict with them. In general, the case was hushed up and there were no criminal consequences.
It is noteworthy that last spring Sosva-Les LLC again got into a scandal. Together with Kapital-Stroy LLC and Tayozhnoye LLC, he was convicted of exporting wood waste to the banks of the Sosva River. “According to the results of the meeting, it was decided that timber processing waste from the water protection zone of the Sosva River will be removed by May 1 under the leadership of the head of the Sosvinsky urban district by timber processors,” the local media reported then. It was last spring. But, as you can see, no one has seriously taken up the problem of logging safety. Even legitimate companies favored by the authorities cut down trees “black” and scatter garbage everywhere. By the way, they themselves suffer from this. It is known that one of the production sites of Sosva-Les LLC burned down during a fire in Sosva. The damage amounted to about 25 million rubles.
People were already dying, houses were on fire, equipment was being destroyed… What else needs to happen for the authorities and logging companies to finally put things in order in the industry and take care of the forest, both living and cut down?
Wildfire season is already in full swing. By Friday, May 5, 86 outbreaks were blazing in the Russian regions. 12 of them are in the Amur region. Last week, the village of Uspenka burned down in the Tyumen region – dozens of houses. Residents and patients with PND managed to evacuate. Farm animals have died. Local authorities are looking for forest arsonists.
The last week of April was the most “hot” in the Kurgan region. About a hundred houses in several settlements burned down, industrial enterprises suffered. A resident of the village of Logoushki died after returning to the burning house for documents.
Rumors appeared on the Web that about a dozen political scientists and PR people from Moscow received an order from contractors close to the governors of the Kurgan and Sverdlovsk regions. The task was set to whitewash the governors in the eyes of the authorities and the population in the context of forest fires. The main goal is to convince the public that the forests are set on fire by agents of the Ukrainian special services. Thus, removing questions about where the money allocated for the prevention and extinguishing of forest fires has gone. They say that the governor of Kurgan Vadim Shumkov can spend about 45 million rubles on PR services, and the head of the Sverdlovsk region Evgeny Kuyvashev – more than 100 million.
It seems that in Moscow they also cease to trust the regionals in the topic of forest protection. According to government estimates, 10–30 million cubic meters of industrial timber worth 20–60 billion rubles are illegally cut down in Russia every year, which is not accounted for anywhere. Approximately a tenth of such a forest is cut completely “black”, without any documents. The remaining 9 out of 10 illegally felled trees are destroyed under false documents. For example, under the guise of sanitary felling. It is precisely such episodes that are conveniently “masked” by fires.
In order to somehow change the situation, the government is going to take away the function of control over forests from the regions and transfer it to the Federal Forestry Agency. The services of such controllers will cost the budget about 5 billion a year. The amount was announced by the government last year. Judging by the fact that the decision was not reported, she was considered unbearable.
But the other day, the Ministry of Emergency Situations proposed not to spend money on fire prevention, but to earn money on them. They want to fine the owner of the land for causing a fire, and not the culprit of the fire. Although back in 2022 the decision of the Supreme Court came out. It says: “… the owner does not have to compensate for damage if the fire occurred through the fault of another person with whom he did not commit any joint actions.” Will the desire to replenish the budget be more powerful than legal subtleties?
