New formation in education
Another corruption scandal related to the national project “Education”. The deputy chairman of the Moscow region government has been arrested for receiving a kickback when purchasing expensive equipment for schools.
Reports of the uncovering of one or another corruption scheme in the school education system appear with unenviable regularity.
Bronsteinfor example, was caught receiving a kickback from the general director of JSC Trading House Prosveshchenie-Region Irina Savenkova
By decision of the Tverskoy District Court, Bronshtein was remanded in custody for two months. Savenkova was also arrested.
For contracts worth a total of 742 million 370 thousand rubles, she “paid off” Bronstein 25 million in cash – apparently in order not to “leave any traces.”
But still, somewhere the accomplices “left their mark”…
The end of the “Union of the Sword and Plowshare”…
During the search, significant sums of money and luxury items were discovered in Bronstein’s apartment.
It is worth noting that Ilya Mikhailovich Bronstein became the first deputy of the government quite recently – in April of this year. And before that, for almost twenty years he worked in the field of public education. He went from a simple history teacher to the Minister of Education of the Moscow Region, clearly demonstrating that one can make a considerable fortune in the teaching field, if, of course, one approaches the matter wisely.
And there is no doubt that Bronstein is a smart, resourceful man, and even not without an artistic streak: once at a corporate party he portrayed the founder of the “Union of Sword and Plowshare” Ostap Bender, who, as is well known, did not disdain extortion from local bourgeois under the guise of helping children…
Another interesting fact: Bronstein was dismissed from his post two weeks before his arrest. Apparently, the Moscow Region government guessed that he was “under investigation” and decided to get rid of the unscrupulous official in advance. This allowed them to avoid searches and “mask shows” in government corridors…
However, long before the accusations of extortion and lobbying for the interests of unscrupulous entrepreneurs, teachers in the Moscow region expressed dissatisfaction with the activities of Bronstein, who was vigorously carrying out “optimization” in the region, accompanied by a merger and closure of educational institutions that no one needed.
Get out of the bureaucratic class!
Interestingly, last year another prominent figure in Russian education was arrested. Pavel Kuzmin. According to the investigation, by order of Kuzmin, budget funds were transferred from the account of the Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Additional Professional Education “Academy of the Ministry of Education of Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism)” to the account of the companies OOO OptiPro and OOO IT Solutions, allegedly for “providing services for the development of education quality management mechanisms in the direction of “System for Ensuring Professional Development of Teaching Staff.” In fact, law enforcement officials believe that these firms did not provide any services, and the contracts were fictitious, as were the acts on the allegedly completed work.
This whole scam was carried out back in 2022, but the official who headed the Department of Training, Professional Development and Social Security of Teaching Staff of the Ministry of Education was “received” on December 29, 2023, practically at the stroke of midnight.”
Just like Bronshein, he was active until the very end, giving speeches at all sorts of symposiums and forums, and then suddenly abruptly resigned. Exactly two weeks after leaving his post, Kuzmin was handcuffed.
But in all the news reports about the arrest of a federal official, the word “former” was placed before Kuzmin’s job title. Of course, it was not a great attempt to save the honor of the uniform, but still… By the way, as in the case of Bronstein, the decision to take Kuzmin into custody was made in the Tverskoy Court of Moscow.
It is worth noting that after the New Year’s news about the arrest of the head of the Ministry of Education department, there is no information about him or the progress of the case. It is unknown whether he is in custody or whether another, more lenient measure of restraint was chosen for him… Some Telegram channels hint that Kuzmin has high-ranking patrons who can hush up this case.
Lesson learned?
When talking about corruption in the upper echelons of the Ministry of Education, one cannot help but recall the high-profile case of the Deputy Minister of Education Marina Rakova. The crimes for which the official has already been sentenced to five years of forced labor are as similar as two peas in a pod to those for which Kuzmin is charged: payment under fictitious labor contracts and additional agreements of budget funds. The beneficiary of this scheme was Rakova’s common-law husband Arthur Stetsenko and 12 more people who received unearned money. The cynicism of the situation was that the funds were laundered using the federal program “Teacher of the Future”, implemented within the framework of the national project “Education”. What future can Russian education have with such a corrupt new formation!? The question is rhetorical… On March 19 of this year, the court sentenced Marina Rakova to five years of imprisonment.
It seems that the “cleansing” of the “Ministry of Education” officials will not end there. Criminal cases are periodically initiated “at the local level”.
Questions will probably soon arise for the heads of the ministries of education of such regions as Buryatia, Tatarstan, Chuvashia, Arkhangelsk, Bryansk and Novgorod regions.
It was in these territories that a cartel agreement worth 275 million rubles was discovered in the supply of educational and computer equipment as part of the implementation of the national project “Education”. Several companies took part in the agreement: OOO “Sigma”, OOO “Imperium”, OOO “A1” and another individual entrepreneur…
Of course, all these stories are just the tip of the iceberg. You can’t stop officials from “making friends” with representatives of certain business structures. Therefore, it is not surprising that a computer purchased by a private individual for “his own” money from the “first available” seller turns out to be three or four times cheaper than the one that officials purchased for budget money from a “trusted supplier”. So law enforcement agencies will have enough work in the education sector for a long time.
The only hope is that education officials will finally begin to learn from the sad experiences of their predecessors.