Former deputy director of the Federal Penitentiary Service Valery Maksimenko will go to prison for nine years. On May 12, the Odintsovo City Court of the Moscow Region sentenced him to this term. The retired general was found guilty in the case of bribery and abuse of power. We are talking about the implementation of the federal target program for the construction and repair of prison hospitals and pre-trial detention centers. According to the investigation, through the fault of Maksimenko, 19 such facilities were unfinished in 2018-2019. The ex-deputy head of the service pleaded not guilty, he considers the case against himself fabricated, his lawyer told Izvestia. The general was far from the first high-ranking officer of the service convicted of corruption crimes, experts recalled.
Prison bunks and a house on Rublyovka
The former deputy director of the Federal Penitentiary Service, Valery Maksimenko, is now punished himself – he was sentenced to nine years in a strict regime in the case of bribery and abuse of office. This decision was made by the Odintsovo City Court of the Moscow Region on Thursday, May 12, recognizing the retired general as guilty of concluding obviously impossible state contracts and disrupting the federal targeted program for the construction and repair of isolation wards.
In the FSIN system, Maksimenko oversaw logistics issues, in particular, the construction and repair of service facilities. He was also responsible for the implementation of the federal target program “Development of the penitentiary system for 2018-2026”.
At the beginning of 2018, the shortage of places in pre-trial detention centers in the constituent entities of the Russian Federation was about 14 thousand. And the conditions of detention in pre-trial detention centers in 23 subjects were recognized as unsanitary. There was a critical shortage of places for the treatment of suspects and convicts, according to the text of the program (Izvestia has it). The state allocated more than 54.9 billion rubles to solve the problem. With this money, almost 90% of pre-trial detention centers and 73% of medical institutions of the Federal Penitentiary Service were to be brought into line with Russian legislation and international standards. To do this, they were going to build new and repair old isolation wards, as well as hospitals for prisoners. In addition, they planned to create almost 17 thousand additional jobs for convicts.
Valery Maksimenko’s troubles began in 2020 after an audit by the Accounts Chamber. The inspectors concluded that in 2018 and 2019 the program was in danger of failure, in particular, 19 planned facilities were not put into operation. These results were submitted to the Prosecutor General’s Office, and from there to the Investigative Committee, which came to the conclusion that the “failure” had a guilty person – Valery Maksimenko.
According to the investigation, in 2018-2019, Maksimenko secured the conclusion of several state contracts for the construction and repair of facilities in the penitentiary system with companies affiliated with him. To do this, he convinced the heads of the territorial departments of the service not to master the funding limits already allocated under the program, but to conclude contracts with the Federal State Unitary Enterprise Construction Administration for the North Caucasus Federal District of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia. Although, according to investigators, the general knew perfectly well that the unit did not have either personnel or production resources to implement the project.
– Thus, Maksimenko artificially created the conditions for the subsequent conclusion of contracts with companies associated with his acquaintance. And for this, as well as for general patronage in the service, he received a bribe from a construction businessman in the form of renting a country house in the Odintsovo district of the Moscow region for a total amount of about 2.2 million rubles, the investigators said.
According to investigators, the ex-deputy director of the Federal Penitentiary Service lived in this house on Rublyovka with his family, but did not pay for it.
Companies affiliated with the general did not meet the plans. As a result, the implementation of the target program was on the verge of failure, and the state suffered damage in the amount of more than 330 million rubles.
Initially, Maksimenko was charged with 14 unfinished objects, but by the end of the investigation there were 19 of them. Izvestia sent a request to the Federal Penitentiary Service with a request to clarify what kind of objects they are, where they are located and what their fate is today.
REFERENCE “Izvestia”
Valery Maksimenko is an economist by education, graduated from the Yaroslavl Military School with a gold medal, worked in the foreign intelligence service and in commercial structures. He entered the service in the Federal Penitentiary Service in 2012 at the invitation of the ex-director of the department Gennady Kornienko, dealt with finances and rear issues (the institute of prison priests, human rights of prisoners, media relations). He repeatedly criticized the system, publicly spoke out on episodes of torture.
He became deputy director of the Federal Penitentiary Service in 2016. And in August 2018, he began to engage in construction. Maksimenko was detained in November 2020, a few months after his dismissal from the Federal Penitentiary Service. Initially, he was accused of abuse of office (part 3 of article 285 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), but later a second criminal case was opened – about a bribe. The trial has been going on for almost a year, since July 2022.
He has already become the third deputy director of the Federal Penitentiary Service to receive a term for corruption. His predecessor Oleg Korshunov was sentenced to 16 years in prison for fraud in the purchase of sugar and gasoline, the production of shoes for prisoners, and theft of 94 million rubles during the construction of a pre-trial detention center in Simferopol, which was not completed under the target program.
In 2020, the court sentenced Nikolai Barinov to 3.5 years in prison for taking a bribe of 44.1 million rubles during the construction of Russia’s largest pre-trial detention center Kresty-2. In 2021, Barinov died at the age of 62.
Where does the money go
At the trial, before entering the “aquarium”, Valery Maksimenko managed to tell Izvestia that he felt “like nothing and hopes that there is at least some justice in this life.” He does not admit his guilt and considers the case against himself fabricated, his lawyer Igor Enikeev told Izvestiya.
According to the lawyer, ex-director of the Federal Penitentiary Service Gennady Kornienko instructed Maksimenko to start construction, because the previous program, calculated until 2017, had 400 unfinished facilities. Among them was, for example, a detention center in Simferopol, for which about 500 million rubles were allocated.
– In 2018, out of the 15 billion rubles planned under the program, 2.1 billion were allocated. With this money, it was necessary to build and repair many facilities in different regions. On August 22, this money was transferred to the account of the central office of the Federal Penitentiary Service, and already on August 23 it went to the territorial authorities without a leadership visa. At that time, the program was still crude and the system of electronic auctions did not work, and there was very little time left until the end of the year. Therefore, Maksimenko decided to return the money back to the central office and issued an order about this, the lawyer explained.
According to Maksimenko, whose position was presented by the lawyer, his former colleagues from the Federal Penitentiary Service were probably not interested in this return, but wanted the money to remain in the regions, although in this case it would be much more difficult to control their intended use. He did not name the names of his alleged opponents, but specified that they were later dismissed from service for negative reasons.
At that time, out of 12 state unitary enterprises of FSI, only two had no debts, among them the North Caucasus Construction Department. Therefore, Maksimenko recommended that the regions conclude a contract with him. The subcontractor was a group of businessmen headed by Dmitry Stupin, who had previously completed the construction of a detention center in Crimea at their own expense, and then began to claim the completion of other facilities. According to the lawyer, the director of the Federal Penitentiary Service Kornienko himself was not against this scheme.
In 2019, the State Unitary Enterprise began to miss the deadlines for work. Maksimenko wrote over a hundred letters to his director asking him to speed up and ordered the legal department of the Federal Penitentiary Service to initiate legal proceedings against the enterprise. In 2019, the arbitration courts recovered penalties and fines for 330 million rubles from the State Unitary Enterprise, and Maksimenko was charged with this amount as damage, the defender explained.
The man did his duty. He left the money in the system, not letting them go anywhere,” said Igor Enikeev.
As for the bribe with the house, Maksimenko never lived in it, Dmitry Stupin gave false evidence against him, the lawyer believes.
In addition to the nine-year term, the court imposed a fine of 43 million rubles, deprived the general of his ranks and state awards.
With regard to persons of such a level as Maksimenko, criminal cases are investigated with particular care, Mansur Yusupov, head of the Moscow Anti-Corruption Committee, told Izvestia.
“Moreover, the case was conducted by the Investigative Committee, everything must be verified there,” the public figure believes.
This is far from an isolated case of corruption in the Federal Penitentiary Service, such cases pop up there all the time, and at the highest level, he recalled.
– Most recently, the former director of the service in 2009-2012, Colonel-General Alexander Reimer, was released from prison. He was convicted of abuse in the purchase of electronic bracelets (Reimer was sentenced in 2017 to eight years in prison for embezzling 2.2 billion rubles, and in February 2020 he was released on parole. – Izvestia), – said the head of the committee.
Oleksandr Kizlyk helped smugglers of large amounts of currency escape punishment
In recent years, the investigating authorities have uncovered several abuses in the penitentiary system in different regions. This is due to fraud in the construction industry, with bonuses to employees and spending budget funds under government contracts, said Alexander Brod, a member of the HRC and the public council of the Federal Penitentiary Service.
“There are no untouchables before the law,” he said. – At the same time, the accusation should be built exclusively in the legal sphere, so that it is not perceived as a settling of scores and the elimination of objectionable people.
According to the report of the head of the Investigative Committee Alexander Bastrykin for 2022, the Federal Penitentiary Service ranks second in the ranking of corruption after the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Last year, 206 criminal cases were initiated against employees of the service, 89 of them were convicted, Mansur Yusupov cited statistics.
The intra-FSIN anti-corruption structure essentially does not work, and its leadership itself often becomes involved in corruption scandals, the expert summed up.
