Posadskie plantings
The court has placed Dmitry Akulov under arrest. The mayor is accused of receiving a bribe of 15 million rubles. The investigation considers the head of the MFC branch in Sergiev Posad, Yulia Kaminskaya, to be his accomplice.
Career Dmitry Akulov in municipal government began in 2016, when he received the position of deputy head of Sergiev Posad Mikhail Tokarev. In this position, Akulov, among other things, supervised the work of the MFC. Last spring, Tokarev resigned of his own accord, and his former subordinate became mayor. However, to better understand the picture, history should be rewinded a little.
Unsinkable cartridges
Mikhail Tokarev's predecessor in Sergiev Posad was Sergey Pakhomov. He took up the post of head of the Sergiev Posad district in 2013, having resigned from his position as senator from the Ivanovo region. This was at a time when the current governor of the Moscow region Andrey Vorobyov was just getting comfortable in his seat. In 2016, Pakhomov was elected to the State Duma from the Sergiev Posad electoral district, and left his adviser Mikhail Tokarev to lead the district.
The current position of Dmitry Akulov's two predecessors deserves special mention. As can be seen, 49-year-old deputy Sergei Pakhomov lobbies for the interests of the construction business in the Duma. Recently, he has come under a wave of criticism. Nasha Versiya also wrote about him, noting that Pakhomov's actions play into the hands of large developers. They remind him of his ownership of foreign real estate, as well as the obvious discrepancy between his lifestyle and the amounts in his official declaration. They are also surprised by the income of his wife, who receives 10-20 million per year.
As for Mikhail Tokarev, after his resignation from the post of head of Sergiev Posad, he went into the shadows for some time, but then appeared in the position of advisor to the Minister of Construction Complex of the Moscow Region Vladimir Loktev. In this context, two news items should be recalled. In September 2023, the First Deputy Minister of the Construction Complex of the Moscow Region Victor Ostashkin was detained in a bribery case – he allegedly acted as an intermediary, other details of this case have not yet been published. And already in July 2024, the deputy director of the Moscow Region Capital Repairs Fund was detained Mstislav Dymnichhe is suspected of receiving a bribe on an especially large scale.
It is still unknown how these cases of two functionaries of the Moscow region construction complex are connected. But based on what has been said, one can assume that Dmitry Akulov's patrons found themselves in the thick of some behind-the-scenes showdowns and clouds are gathering over them. And the weakest link in this bundle of former mayors of Sergiev Posad turned out to be the current head (since 2019, the Sergiev Posad district has become an urban district, and now this municipality is simply called Sergiev Posad).
The essence of the scheme in which 42-year-old Dmitry Akulov got caught is as follows. According to investigators, the head of the local MFC Julia Kaminskaya Since 2019, she has been hiring “dead souls” and receiving wages for them. It is reported that 15 million of the money received in this way could have been transferred to Dmitry Akulov. This could be classified as a bribe for connivance in service.
Dmitry Akulov and Yulia Kaminskaya did not hide their friendly relationship; their joint photo in an embrace is now circulating on social networks.
This year, Yulia Kaminskaya was planning to run for the local council of deputies, but now, it seems, these plans can be forgotten.
Old new faces
The successor to Dmitry Akulov, who resigned after ending up in a pretrial detention center, was Sergey Tostanovsky. Here is what is known about him from local press reports. Until 2003, he worked as the chief accountant and financial director at Sergiev Posad Bakery OJSC, and since 2005, he held positions in local government. That is, he managed to work with both Sergei Pakhomov and Mikhail Tokarev. At first, Tostanovsky was the deputy head of the district for financial and economic issues, then he oversaw construction, and later became Dmitry Akulov's first deputy. At the same time, he managed to get caught up in a corruption scandal – in 2013, a criminal case was opened against him for abuse of office. The investigation claimed that in April 2009, when Sergei Tostanovsky held the position of acting head of the Sergiev Posad district, he gave an order to change the status of a land plot in the protected area of the village of Radonezh. Initially, this land was intended for agriculture, and Tostanovsky's decision allowed construction on it. In 2015, the court found the official guilty, but released him from liability due to the expiration of the statute of limitations for the crime. By the way, his wife Larisa Tostanovskaya was one of the co-founders of a local construction company, OOO Stroyinvest-Service; the woman owns shares in several enterprises in Sergiev Posad.
Multifunctional feeder
MFCs have effectively become the face of the state in the eyes of citizens. However, regional officials often perceive them as another feeding trough. The story of the “dead souls” in the Sergiev Posad MFC is not unique; in 2022, a similar scheme was uncovered in another Moscow region city, Voskresensk. However, that episode involved only 500 thousand rubles. In 2018, the director of the Novosibirsk MFC was caught in a similar scam, having appropriated 400 thousand rubles. It seems that such schemes can be put on stream in the MFC. And it is not surprising, because the very economy of the MFC pushes managers to all sorts of padding.
Application to the MFC is free for citizens, that is, the services of the document processing center are paid for by budgets. This means that the center's management is interested in inflating expenses. It is noteworthy that MFC offices are sometimes managed not by government agencies, but by private companies. In 2015, it was reported that the first private MFCs had opened in shopping centers in the Moscow region. It was assumed that the experience would be extended to other regions.
It is unknown how many private MFCs have been opened across the country since then. However, it is clear that the vast majority of offices are managed by state or municipal structures. As corruption cases show, this is a very lucrative area for local officials and they are unlikely to be interested in handing it over to private individuals.
