How Gleb Nikitin manages federal billions
Our Version continues to monitor the situation in the regions where gubernatorial elections will be held in the fall. In the Nizhny Novgorod Region, visible economic prosperity hides a political split. Governor Gleb Nikitin, who arrived from Moscow, was unable to consolidate the local elites around him in five years. But he seems ready to take control of the dividends from the generous financial flows that go to the region from the federal center.
About your desire to go to a new term Gleb Nikitin announced at the end of last year. Now it is worth waiting for what they will say on the Old Square. They say that the Nizhny Novgorod region remains in the focus of attention of the curator of the internal politicians presidential administration Sergei Kiriyenko, who at one time graduated from the Gorky Institute of Water Transport Engineers, then made a business career in the region, and from 2000 to 2005 served as presidential envoy in the Volga Federal District. Therefore, if the presidential administration decides to look at the ongoing processes in Nizhny under a magnifying glass, they can see a lot of interesting things. First of all, regarding the solution of the long-standing problems of the region and the fate of the money bled from Moscow.
In debt and in the cold
After becoming Acting Governor of the Nizhny Novgorod Region in 2017, Gleb Nikitin set the following priorities for himself: social and political consolidation, budget preparation, and the heating season. You can talk a lot about the shortcomings on the first point – they are briefly written in our help. As for the budget, for 2023 it was adopted with a deficit of 16.8 billion rubles. For comparison: the regional budget for 2018 was adopted with a surplus of 100 million rubles. That is, the income of the regional treasury for five years in rubles has approximately doubled, but now this is not enough to reduce the debit to the credit.
It can be assumed that budget expenditures increased precisely for the elections, since significant sums were finally allocated to work on long-standing problems – the elimination of landfills, wastewater treatment, the development of rural areas, the formation of a modern urban environment, etc. However, all this became possible thanks to financial injections from the federal center. So the balancing of the budget in the achievement of Gleb Nikitin cannot be written down.
And here is the news of the spring of last year: the inhabitants of Nizhny Novgorod then complained en masse about the cold in their apartments due to the premature end of the heating season.
As can be seen, following the results of the five-year governorship, Gleb Nikitin has nothing to brag about: he failed to achieve his goals. However, the Nizhny Novgorod governor has already formulated new priorities for himself.
At the end of last year, he gave a long interview to TASS, in which he outlined the tasks for the new governor’s term. All of them relate exclusively to the regional capital (other cities seem to be of no interest to the governor). This is the development of the metro, the construction of an IT campus and the renewal of electric transport. However, in the words of Gleb Nikitin, one can see a certain discrepancy: the projects of these facilities have already been accepted, and a lot of money has been divided for their implementation. So for the next five years, the regional authorities (with or without Nikitin) will only reap the fruits of the work of contractors, whatever they turn out to be.
Mysterious concessions
As for the metro, we are talking about the construction of 3.1 kilometers of track and two new stations by 2026. The contract worth about 35 billion rubles went to the only participant in the tender – the capital company Mosproekt-3 JSC. A billion of this amount will be spent on adjusting projects developed in 2011, and the money is expected in the form of an infrastructure budget loan from the federal center. Recall: the construction of the metro in Krasnoyarsk was resumed according to a similar scheme, which led to the pre-trial detention center of the owner of the design organization Oleg Mitvol. Will the people of Nizhny Novgorod manage to work more purely from a corruption point of view?
The construction of an interuniversity IT campus will require an even more impressive amount – 41 billion rubles in current prices. The contract for the construction of the first stage has already been received by the Moscow LLC “Monotek Stroy”. The technical customer is the Moscow developer GloraX, 95% of the company belongs to Andrey Birzhin. GloraX has already received construction sites in Nizhny in a prestigious area on the Chernihiv embankment overlooking the Volga. The developer was given the right to include his projects in the reconstructed embankment (or, conversely, to reconstruct the embankment for his projects – it’s up to you).
As for the financing scheme for the IT campus, federal and regional budgets will provide 60%, the rest was promised by the concessionaire – RIP LLC. This LLC with an authorized capital of 500 thousand rubles was created in 2022 by two near-state structures of the Nizhny Novgorod Region – the state-owned BTI and JSC “Corporation for the Development of the Nizhny Novgorod Region”. In this situation, it is not clear why the concession was needed, because there seem to be no private investors. Although it can be assumed that the share in RIP LLC will eventually pass into the right hands. When can this happen? When the bulk of the costs will be covered by budgets and the project will start to make a profit. The wait is not so long – the campus is promised to be built by 2025.
So in the process of modernization of electric transport, the spheres of influence have also already been divided. Financing in the amount of 50 billion will be provided by the federal and regional budgets, as well as VEB. Earlier, Nizhegorodelektrotrans was transferred from municipal ownership to regional ownership in order to ensure the laying of 150 kilometers of tram tracks. The regional authorities immediately attracted a concessionaire – Ecological Projects LLC, which promised to invest 33 billion rubles (the company was created in 2022 with an authorized capital of 50 thousand rubles and is controlled by the same BTI and the Nizhny Novgorod Region Development Corporation). It is clear that LLC simply cannot have such money, which means that loans from the largest banks will be attracted. Who will enter the business at the stage of making a profit – one can only guess. The rail-laying should take five years, so Gleb Nikitin will have time to control the process if he remains governor for at least one more term.
Political technologists say that local clans gained strength even under the former governor Valery Shantsev, who came to Nizhny from Moscow in 2005 and ruled until 2017. Apparently, over the five years of Gleb Nikitin’s governorship, the picture has not changed much. And it is easy to find an explanation for this: tasty budget orders go to nonresident structures.
The last act of the conflict between Governor Nikitin and the deputies of the local Legislative Assembly (where 40 out of 50 seats belong to United Russia) took place at the end of last year. Then Nikitin’s subordinates introduced an amendment to the local parliament, which removed restrictions on the number of elections of a citizen to the post of governor. It seemed that the issue would be resolved quickly. First, such restrictions have recently been lifted at the level of federal legislation. Secondly, a number of regions of the Russian Federation have already managed to formalize the “perpetuity” of governors. However, the Nizhny Novgorod deputies balked and found a way to reject Nikitin’s proposal. So the second term in the chair of the Nizhny Novgorod governor may be the last for Gleb Nikitin. This episode clearly shows that the people of Nizhny Novgorod clearly did not accept Nikitin, and he could not find an approach to them.