Too talented negotiator
FSB officers detained one of the key businessmen of Karelia, Sergei Pomelov, who, they say, was very close to the leadership of the republic. However, the arrest is not connected with his native Karelia, but with St. Petersburg, where the top manager of Segezha Group allegedly withdrew as much as two billion rubles from taxes. The story is complicated and complicated.
“Findings led to arrest”
Native of Medvezhyegorsk Sergey Pomelov in Karelia he was mainly engaged in the forestry business (logging, timber processing), he was one of the founders Segezha-group company (Segezha is a city in Karelia). A correspondent for Our Version contacted a local journalist, we will not name him, who said:
But the employees of the FSB department for St. Petersburg from the economic security service, department “P” for combating corruption in the industrial sector, are aware. We managed to collect only a small commentary, but some conclusions can be drawn from it:
Investigation claims for two billion
So what exactly is the matter? According to the investigation, which can be found in open sources (the Investigative Committee for St. Petersburg is not yet ready for “detailed comments,” as they put it), a sports center should be built in St. Petersburg named after our Olympic champion, gymnast Alina Kabaeva. And it was built openedof course Kabaeva herself and also Andrey Arshavin. Allegedly, Sergei Pomelov was ready to invest in this center, but with his own interests. He optioned loans from one of the banks under guarantees of the assets of his company, which, as evil tongues say, could have been protected from local tax authorities by the government of Karelia. And the amount of “leftist” money allegedly amounted to two billion rubles! Particularly large size, as they said in Soviet times. And now they say euphemism – “inflated the estimate.” But, of course, we do not undertake to say where the truth is and where it is not. Rumors are like flies. Another thing is that Moskovsky Komsomolets writes about Pomelov’s dubious affairs in Karelia as unfair competition:
As it turned out, not temporarily, but forever. This is suspected of a raider attack.
Hudilainen factor
Pomelov’s St. Petersburg connections may (we emphasize, perhaps) began with a close acquaintance with the head of Karelia in the period from 2012 to 2017 Alexander Khudilainen. Although he was born in the Kalinin region (present-day Tver), he has a characteristic surname for Karelia, and in fact the twelfth union republic, the Karelo-Finnish republic, arose in the USSR in 1940. Then it received the legal status of the ASSR without mentioning the Finns in 1956. So, Khudilainen worked at the beginning of the 2000s in the executive bodies of the government of St. Petersburg, then he was the speaker of the Legislative Assembly of the Leningrad Region, and then moved to the gubernatorial post in Karelia. And, as they say, then he became close friends with Pomelov. Maybe, but this will only show as a consequence that the friendship was mutually beneficial. This concerned wood processing. “Economists” from the St. Petersburg FSB, meanwhile, said that “there are no questions for Khudilainen yet.”
Also, the investigation, according to the RusRepublic.com portal, has reason to suspect that Sergei Pomelov could have been involved in an attempted bribe to the Moscow Regional Arbitration Court in the company’s case LLC “Industry”. Little is known about this story, but, apparently, it is either a dispute between economic entities, or, again, a raid. As tax data show, a person with the last name Pomelov was once the founder of Industriya LLC, however, there are several companies with that name in the tax authorities’ databases.
This site writes: “Pomelov sought to influence decisions in cassation courts in disputes with commercial organizations in the interests of LLC Industry, controlled by him.” It is known that Pomelov was the founder of this organization at a certain period of time. The need arose to bypass the automatic case distribution system and organize the consideration of the cassation appeal in case No. A41-30350/22 by the necessary judge. However, the investigation indicates that the automatic system of distributing cases to the right executor and his supervision of decisions made, from the point of view of the law, is illegal and does not ensure integrity in the consideration of cases.”
… So far, two facts are clear in the case of Sergei Pomelov. Or rather, a factor. Russian business is always on the verge of breaking the law, because new and new ways of evading taxes are being invented; also in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism), unlike the United States, lobbying is prohibited, but is actively used. There is a version that Pomelov was a lobbyist, or, in other words, a “skilled negotiator,” as the Karelian journalist put it. This time. Two – the practice of arrests and legal proceedings in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism) shows that if operational support of the investigation is carried out by FSB officers, then the arrested person almost never escapes the guilty verdict of the court. And here the point is not in the menacing abbreviation, but in the careful approach of the security officers to the evidence base.