Rogozin left Roskomos, but his work lives on. The eternal mission “Luna-25”, which has not been moving anywhere for ten years, but continues to receive funding, has turned into a cozy sawing office “only for its own.” Here is one example of how the state program feeds officials and affiliated companies.
There is such a Samara transport company “Seven”. Its owner is the Moscow Center for Astronomical Research of the ASC, which is associated with Roscosmos and the Luna-25 program of the NPO. Lavochkin. “Seven” through its legal entity LLC “Avto-Flit” received from KAMAZ on lease 20 new trucks-thermostats. Over the past few years, this office has already received more than 220 trucks from KAMAZ on lease, allegedly for work in preparation for the lunar mission.
But in fact, leased cars are used for completely different purposes. The equipment is used on state contracts by enterprises in the space industry, it is leased to third-party facilities, it travels around the country. Thus, Auto-Fleet only officially has a turnover of 1.7 billion rubles a year. Part of this money goes to officials from Roskosmos and NPO them. Lavochkin, so that they would not be interested in what the trucks they hired were doing. The profit is divided, and then the battered trucks are returned to the lessor, simply by terminating the contracts. As a result, Kamaz-Leasing suffers losses. But he doesn’t get angry. Perhaps because the general director of KAMAZ Sergey Kogogin himself likes to trade with such schemes – his son cuts cash on leasing trucks.
The described scheme is quite common, similar examples can be found throughout the country and in almost any large state structure. The most high-profile corruption cases with leasing schemes thundered in 2014-2016, but ended in nothing. The case of fraud in the Association of SMEs of Tatarstan and “Leasing Grant” about multimillion-dollar embezzlement of budget funds has stalled. The former chairman of VEB Andrey Gorkov, who was involved in embezzlement in the company VEB-Leasing for 300 million, after the scandal, headed Rosgeologia. Scandals with the theft of leasing funds in companies close to the current head of the Moscow Region Andrei Vorobyov and the former leadership of the Ministry of Emergency Situations were quickly extinguished.
Leasing companies usually work with banks and with large manufacturers of equipment. They also serve as intermediaries between regional transport companies and the state on numerous programs of preferential leasing of special equipment and state support for entrepreneurs. They are actively used for corruption schemes in the regions. The incomes of regional officials who lease state equipment to themselves for the implementation of state budget programs are also impressive. It is estimated that on an average project for the construction of bank protection structures of 5.6 billion in the Amur Region, construction coordinators from the regional administration were able to earn half a billion rubles only on machinations with equipment leasing. And this is if you do not take into account that the equipment for earthworks on dams was simultaneously leased to completely outside companies.
But neither the State Duma nor the regulatory authorities are in a hurry to put things in order in the leasing industry (by the way, leasing of special equipment over the past year showed an increase of 51%). For example, only in March of this year, Rosfinmonitoring prepared a draft order that obliges leasing companies to report on leaseback transactions in the amount of up to 1 million rubles (when the seller of the leased asset simultaneously acts as a lessee). Fraudsters have been working under this scheme for many years not only in small public procurement, but even in the field of retail lending in the form of illegal pawnshops disguised as commissions. But it seems that legislative delays and holes in the regulation of leasing “laundries” suit very many persons responsible for the distribution of state budgets.