The Prosecutor General’s Office approved the indictment in a criminal case against ex-governor of the Khabarovsk Territory Sergei Furgal. It is connected with the theft of funds from the only electrometallurgical enterprise in the Far East for steel smelting – the Amurstal plant (Torex-Khabarovsk LLC).
This case was initiated in October 2021. At that time, Furgal had been in the Lefortovo pre-trial detention center for a year and a half (in the case of organizing murders in the region). Three months later, he began a trial in the Lyubertsy City Court of the Moscow Region in the case of organizing the murders of entrepreneurs. On February 10, 2023, the Lyubertsy City Court sentenced Furgal to a record term among ex-governors – to 22 years in prison in a strict regime colony.
According to the investigation, from 2017 to 2018, in Moscow and the Khabarovsk Territory, Furgal (at that time a member of the State Duma, he was the governor from 2018 until the moment of his arrest in 2020), illegally participating in the commercial activities of the enterprises of the Toreks group ( resident of the advanced development territory “Khabarovsk”), in order to steal the assets of JSC “Russian Bank for Support of Small and Medium Enterprises” and commit other serious crimes against property, created a criminal community.
The investigators came to the conclusion that the alleged participants in the organized criminal group, led by Furgal and the lawyer of the Torex group, Nikolai Shukhov, from December 2018 to July 2020, stole more than 2 billion rubles belonging to the specified bank. The investigation also established that the defendants stole $8.7 million from the foreign company Global MetCorp Limited.
In addition, according to the investigation, the defendants tried to steal the property of Toreks-Khabarovsk LLC in the amount of more than 1.2 billion rubles. But they did not succeed, because by that time they had already been detained by law enforcement agencies. While the investigation lasted, almost all the defendants were in a pre-trial detention center, only the deputy chief accountant of Torex Svetlana Osipenko and the chairman of the board of the Russian Bank for Support of Small and Medium Enterprises Dmitry Golovanov are kept under a milder measure of restraint in the form of house arrest.
Together with Furgal, there are several people in the dock (except for the above): lawyer of the Torex group Nikolai Shukhov, financial consultant Yuri Zolochevsky, deputy security director of Torex-Khabarovsk LLC Dmitry Kozlov, director of Far Eastern Monolith LLC Evgenia Averyanova, chief accountant Group “Torex” Galina Aleinikova, financial director of LLC “Torex” Vladislav Karmashkov, director of LLC “Stroitel” Gennady Savochkin.
The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, depending on the role and degree of participation of each, charged the defendants with crimes under Art. 159, 159.1, 174.1, 201, 210, 289 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (organization of a criminal community and participation in it, illegal entrepreneurial activities, abuse of authority in a commercial organization, as well as embezzlement of funds through fraud on an especially large scale and legalization of stolen property).
According to the procedure, after the approval of the indictment by the supervisory authority, the case materials are transferred to the court. As expected, before starting the process, the court will have to determine the territorial jurisdiction. The defense of the accused will insist on consideration in Khabarovsk.
