Military prosecutor’s office is looking for half a billion from a school construction near Saratov

The unfinished school construction in Shikhany-2 turned into a criminal case under part 2 of article 201.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation – abuse of power in the implementation of the state defense order, committed by an organized group and entailed grave consequences.

The case was opened as a result of the audit, according to the official website of the Military Prosecutor’s Office of the Saratov garrison. We are talking about the construction of a school in a military town. The old building has fallen into disrepair and has long been closed. In 2021, a developer was found for the new school in Moscow, but he never completed the task.

For the work, the prosecutor’s office explains, an advance payment was issued in the amount of about 540 million rubles, but 35 million of them were spent for their intended purpose, and the rest were “illegally used by transferring to the accounts of fictitious subcontractors and affiliated entrepreneurs for other purposes in the interests of the company.”

The story with the school surfaced in November 2022 during the next visit of the speaker of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin, who complained about the long-term construction of local residents. Then he gave a dressing down to military builders, PPK “Military Construction Company” (VSK). The main claim is the involvement of a subcontractor who already owes the military 12 billion rubles. The total amount of expenses for the school during the speaker’s visit was called around 800 million rubles, of which the subcontractor was given a monstrous advance payment – about 600 million. This figure generally coincides with the statement of the prosecutor’s office.

The name of the contractor was not previously mentioned by anyone, neither the speaker nor the military. “Version-Saratov”, with reference to the prosecutor’s office, claims that it is about JSC “Atrium” and the case has been opened against its director. Earlier in Vyacheslav Volodin’s TG channel, the name of a company with a slightly different form of ownership, Atrium SD, sounded. It was not possible to find an operating joint-stock company with that name in the capital, but SD Atrium LLC exists and really has complex relations with the structures of the Ministry of Defense.

Since November 20, 2022, a claim from VSK in the amount of 582.3 million rubles has been in the proceedings of the Moscow Arbitration Court. The reason for the debt from court documents is still unclear. It is known that arbitration sessions were postponed several times due to the failure of the defendant’s representatives to appear. The military builders demanded the arrest of the accounts of the Atrium SD for the amount of the claim, but by a ruling dated March 20 of this year, the court refused them.
The military has accumulated a lot of claims against SD “Atrium” and for very large sums. Since the beginning of February, 2 lawsuits from the Federal State Unitary Enterprise “Main Military Construction Directorate for Special Facilities” have been pending, the total amount of claims exceeds 1.9 billion rubles. In early March, an invoice for 583.7 million rubles was issued by the Main Directorate of Spetsstroy.

Purchases of institutions subordinated to the Ministry of Defense – the information is not public. But if the school in Shikhany-2, aka Volsk-18, was actually built by the Atrium SD and the 582 million rubles required by the Military Construction Company is the same advance payment with some kind of penalties, the case turns out to be very loud. Such financial losses at Saratov schools have not surfaced yet. In any case, it is strange that, while declaring that 0.5 billion rubles were leaked to affiliates, the military prosecutor’s offices do not qualify this as embezzlement. But even under the article named by the department, the punishment can be very severe – from 5 to 10 years in prison with deprivation of the right to hold certain positions for 5 years.

Help “BV”. SD Atrium LLC is a construction company founded in Moscow in 2013. Since its inception, it has changed owners four times. Since 2016, Tatyana Alyabyeva has been the sole founder. Management also changed very often. Until September 2021, the post of CEO was held by Dmitry Sokolov, he was replaced by Tatyana Alyabeva herself, who already in March 2022 handed over the reins to Alexei Afanasyev. He was replaced a couple of months later by Maxim Nesterov. In 2022, the company repeatedly suspended operations on accounts in accordance with Article 46 of the Tax Code: certain obligatory payments, taxes or fines were forcibly deducted from it. The authorized capital of SD “Atrium” is 10 million rubles, the revenue in 2021 is 2.4 billion rubles.