As it became known to Kommersant, the Tverskoy Court of the capital received a petition to arrest the owner of Ortima Development, Albert Khudoyan. The entrepreneur is already serving an eight-year sentence in the case of embezzlement of assets estimated at 4.2 billion rubles from his business partner. This time, he is charged with stealing shares of Aviacity, the amount of damage, according to Kommersant, exceeds 3.74 billion rubles. The injured party in the new case, as in the first one, is the offshore Mansfield Executive Ltd, while businessman Sergei Govyadin is no longer mentioned in the materials as a representative of this company, but as its beneficiary.
Since January 2023, the Main Investigation Department of the Main Investigation Department of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for Moscow has been investigating a new criminal case against Albert Khudoyan. It also led his previous case. According to Kommersant’s information, Albert Khudoyan was charged with especially large-scale fraud (part 4 of article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) on January 27, and the amount of damage that he is charged with exceeds 3.74 billion rubles. As in the first investigation, the injured party is the offshore company Mansfield Executive Ltd, but at the same time, businessman Sergei Govyadin last time appeared in the case file as a representative of this company, and now, according to Kommersant, it is already mentioned as its beneficiary. The name of the former owner of this company, ex-State Duma deputy from A Just Russia, Ildar Saimiev, is not in the new case.
The plot of the fresh investigation, according to Kommersant’s sources, concerns the events of 2015-2019. During this period, according to investigators, Albert Khudoyan stole shares in the authorized capital of Aviacity LLC.
The investigation determined the amount of damage in the case on the basis of an assessment of the value of land plots that belonged on a leasehold basis to LLC, and the demolished terminal building, which was located on them. Albert Khudoyan does not admit guilt. His defense considers the new case illegal and connects it with the desire to completely take away the business from the client.
The Tverskoy District Court intended to consider the investigation’s petition for the arrest of Albert Khudoyan on March 9, but at the request of his lawyers, he postponed the hearing to March 15 – the defense needed additional time to prepare for the meeting. It should be noted that the arrest of a businessman by the GSU officers is necessary, first of all, in order to be able to carry out investigative actions with the participation of the accused, delivering him from the capital’s pre-trial detention center if necessary. It would be difficult to bring him every time from the colony where Albert Khudoyan is serving time in the first case.
Recall that last year Albert Khudoyan was sentenced to eight years in prison, and his accomplice, Aviacity CEO Sergei Konoplev, to five years.
The owner of Optima Development was found guilty of organizing the theft of several land plots on Leningradsky Prospekt from his business partners for a total of 4.2 billion rubles.
And the general director of Aviacity, as the court established, helped to fulfill this criminal plan. The events of the first case date back to 2015-2017, when Optima Development began to implement a project in Moscow to build an elite residential complex “Prime Park” with a total area of 400 thousand square meters. m. Nine high-rise towers were supposed to be erected on the site of the historic building of the Moscow Air Terminal, which had previously been demolished. Aviacity owned the rights of a long-term lease on the land on which the residential complex was to be located, however, the developer did not have any other documents necessary to start work. Then Albert Khudoyan turned with a request for assistance to his old acquaintance, the then State Duma deputy Ildar Saimiev. In return, the new partner received 50% of the area after the implementation of the project. The documents were eventually received, and in 2015 the offshore company Mansfield Executive Ltd, then owned by the deputy, bought out 50% of the shares of Aviacity LLC. However, a year later, Albert Khudoyan, with the assistance of the general director of Aviacity, as follows from the case file, stole property from his partners from his partners by making sham transactions, creating an artificial debt from Aviacity and illegally transferring their assets to third parties.
Recall that the investigation of the case against Albert Khudoyan was accompanied by a loud scandal, which led in 2020 to the resignation of the head of the Investigation Department (SD) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Alexander Romanov and the criminal prosecution of his two deputies, Alexander Biryukov and Alexander Krakovsky, as well as the senior investigator for especially important cases Alexander Bryantsev, who initially handled the case against the developer. SD employees were accused of wanting to ruin the “Khudoyan case”, moreover, Sergey Govyadin also acted as the applicant in the “general’s” case. However, in 2021, Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov refused to approve the indictment in the case against the ex-employees of the investigative department, all three defendants were released from the pre-trial detention center, and the investigation was actually frozen. Until now, all of his defendants remain accused of abuse of official powers, which entailed grave consequences (part 3 of article 285 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). As representatives of the ex-employees of the SD noted, there have been no investigative actions against the accused recently.