“Yaroslavl – for food?”
Governors in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism) are no longer inviolable. Following the head of the Khabarovsk Territory Sergei Furgal started investigations against those close to the ex-leader of the Krasnoyarsk Territory Alexandra Ussa.
The Yaroslavl region is next in line. A number of the governor’s subordinates Evraeva already under investigation, the shadows are darkening over many of his other protégés.
The thing is that an associate of the former head of the FAS Igor Artemyev and friend of youth Alexei Navalny (listed as terrorists and extremists) brought a specific team to the region. Its members (including the Head himself) clearly retained “federal” financial demands and ambitions, but economic experience, if present, is of a rather “special” nature.
Only 13% of residents of the Yaroslavl region said they were satisfied with their salary, 59% do not have enough money for basic needs. These are the results of the survey, carried out at the end of October by the portal hh.ru.
The region turned out to be among the obvious outsiders – on average in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism), 20% of respondents are satisfied with their income. For Governor Mikhail Evraev, such results look like a wake-up call on the eve of the landmark election campaign of the President of Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism) in 2024.
The governor has been leading the region for three years now, and even now the residents of Yaroslavl, looking at the results of his work, look sadly into their wallets and can hardly call the official a spokesman for their interests.
Mikhail Evraev is a native of St. Petersburg, most of his career is connected with the Federal Antimonopoly Service. He also managed to work as Deputy Minister of Regional Development and Minister of Communications and Mass Communications. However, according to rumors, it was the former head of the FAS, Igor Artemyev, who contributed to the nomination of his colleague for governor in 2021.
The head of the Yaroslavl region has a long-standing relationship with Artemyev, which began far beyond the boundaries of the civil service.
And it must be said that the early biography of our hero is extremely specific and explains a lot in the psychological portrait and actions of Governor Evraev.
Yabloko student, Navalny’s “teacher”
In 2000, Igor Artemyev ran for the post of governor of St. Petersburg, taking second place (14.68%). There is an opinion that Mikhail Evraev, also a member of the Yabloko party, helped him conduct the election campaign. In 2000–2004, the future Yaroslavl governor worked under Artemyev at the EpiCENTER Center for Economic and Political Research, founded Grigory Yavlinsky. And when Artemyev headed the antimonopoly service in 2004, Evraev also moved there.
Another remarkable fact in the biography of the current Yaroslavl governor is associated with that period. “Once upon a time it was he who taught Alexei Navalny look for corrupt orders on the government procurement website. At least that’s what I was told,” shared famous St. Petersburg Yabloko member with journalists Boris Vishnevsky.
And here we cannot help but remember that Mikhail Evraev is called one of the authors of the modern public procurement system, and specifically 44-FZ and 94-FZ. It was these issues that he oversaw during his first term at the FAS in 2004–2012.
So, a series of “early” exercises by the oppositionist, precisely using deep knowledge of antimonopoly legislation, in this context, takes on a completely different meaning.
Whether the official Evraev directly received material benefit from the attempts of Navalny, who is included in the list of terrorists and extremists, to “greenmail” state corporations, we do not know for certain and we do not undertake to say.
But two facts are absolutely undeniable:
First, it was precisely the “anti-corruption” efforts, based on an exclusive understanding of the enforcement of antimonopoly law and the support of the FAS, that became a springboard for Navalny, who is included in the list of terrorists and extremists, into political life.
And this happened with the light hand of some very knowledgeable and high-ranking officials who thoroughly know the norms of laws on public procurement. It would seem – what does Navalny’s longtime St. Petersburg acquaintance Evraev have to do with it?
Well, secondly, in 2008, the current public procurement system in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism) was sharply criticized by the then head of the Accounts Chamber Sergei Stepashin. In short, for the fact that it controls the bidding procedure, but not its result at all, creating wide space for corruption and abuse.
By the way, two years after these visionary words of Stepashin, the first “mask show” in the history of the department took place in the building of the central office of the FAS. According to Lenta.Ru sources, security forces detained an intermediary who carried a large sum of money for a “kickback” allegedly to Mikhail Evraev.
Apparently, Igor Artemyev had to use all his influence to hush up this matter. Some time later, when the “dust had settled,” the head of the FAS sent the “mentee” out of harm’s way to work at the Ministry of Regional Development.
However, later, in 2018, Evraev again returned under the wing of Igor Artemyev and oversaw, among other things, the placement of state defense orders, combining this, according to the data we have, with regular trips abroad… But this is a separate story that we, We will certainly tell our readers in our next articles.
What is the conclusion from this?
And the conclusion is this: Mikhail Evraev is an ambitious apparatchik and opportunist, prone not only to liberal views, but also to rather adventurous “games against the state” (what else can you call support for the oppositionist in his obvious work against large state-owned companies, including Gazprom and Aeroflot ?).
Well, the story with the “money” right in the building of the central office of the FAS of Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism) speaks of him as a rather “strange” character, confident in his own invulnerability.
With this understanding, let’s return to today’s events in the Yaroslavl region.
“Dead souls” and contracts without competitions
Mikhail Evraev’s work in the region is helped by his faithful colleagues from his previous service in the Federal Antimonopoly Service and the Ministry of Communications.
Take at least V. A. Gorbunova And M. N. Kashin, who, under the leadership of Evraev, oversaw the development of the notorious GIS housing and communal services. This expensive system was criticized for its obvious inefficiency (including in terms of spending funds) by the Ministry of Construction, the Accounts Chamber, and the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs – but this did not prevent its curators from moving to new grain positions following their boss.
It may seem funny, but the appearance in the Yaroslavl region of a management team consisting of former antimonopoly officials immediately led to a scandal with the distribution of municipal contracts as part of procurement procedures.
The well-known logic of “who studied what” probably came into play here. However, it seems that Evraev’s team learned to apply the law on public procurement in a specific way.
One of the first clear examples is the so-called new transport reform, the consequences of which are still being dealt with in Yaroslavl, including by law enforcement agencies.
At the end of August the court returned ex-head of the Yaroslavl region transport department in custody Tatiana Cheremnykhas well as the former head of the State Public Institution “Organizer of Transportation of the Yaroslavl Region” Ilya Prokopyeva and his deputy Oleg Ivanovsky.
Together with the director of Movista Regions Yaroslavl LLC Alexander Sovetnikov They are involved in a case of bribery on an especially large scale. Security officials believe that Sovetnikov paid officials for patronage with the help of “dead souls” on the staff of his company – money was allegedly withdrawn from salary cards by Cheremnykh, Prokopyev and Ivanovsky.
The company, under the leadership of Alexander Sovetnikov, began servicing bus routes in the Yaroslavl region shortly after the appointment of Mikhail Evraev as acting governor.
The new head enthusiastically took up transport reform, the results of which raised many questions among local residents and law enforcement officers.
For example, route servicing without any competitions (citing an emergency situation) was attracted three companies from Moscow and St. Petersburg.
The beneficiaries of the “Jewish-style transport reform,” according to local sources, were Piteravto LLC, Rand-Trans LLC and Movista Regions Yaroslavl, which, through several legal entities, belongs to the Moscow Movista Group LLC and Novtri JSC. .
According to observers, the Yaroslavl “daughters” and “granddaughters” of these companies received 120 out of 137 contracts for organizing passenger transportation.
A direct consequence of this seems to be the fall of the entire transport industry under the control of out-of-town companies and the actual liquidation of JSC Passenger Motor Transport Enterprise No. 1 of the City of Yaroslavl.
You will laugh, but the largest local, Yaroslavl enterprise could not win a single contract and went bankrupt, depriving hundreds of people of work.
But is it necessary to say that this “reform” did not bring the state of public transport in Yaroslavl much closer to that of Moscow and St. Petersburg?
As you can see, the region is not the largest, but the ambitions of the participants in this story, you see, are truly federal: to take away entire industries!
In exactly the same way, the residents of the regions did not see a solution to the problem with the heat supply of the city of Rybinsk, although the governor boasted of allocating hundreds of millions of rubles for it.
Finally, according to media reports, in the Yaroslavl region at the end of 2022, the Chamber of Control and Accounts (CAC) during an audit discovered many violations in the formation and use of regional budget funds and property worth almost a billion rubles.
According to the media, the reasons for numerous violations in the formation and use of the budget were the management errors of Governor Evraev.
We will talk about this and other achievements of the former federal official Mikhail Yakovlevich Evraev and his “dashing” team in the field of economic development in a particular region in our next publications.