Source The investigation united those accused of stealing forest land in the OPS. As it became known to Kommersant, the investigation aggravated the accusation against the former high-ranking officials who were in charge of the forestry of the Moscow region, who were under arrest. According to law enforcement officers, they committed fraud, which consisted in illegally cutting down dozens of hectares of healthy forest under the guise of sanitary and recreational activities, as part of an organized criminal community. The damage caused to the state is currently estimated at more than half a billion rubles.
The criminal case on the illegal cutting of dozens of hectares of forest near Moscow under the guise of sanitary and recreational activities of the Main Investigative Committee of the ICR in the Moscow Region has been investigating for exactly a year. A particularly large-scale fraud (part 4 of article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) was imputed to seven of its defendants at the very beginning. At the same time, the Babushkinsky District Court of Moscow sent most of the accused to a pre-trial detention center. Now the investigation has come to the conclusion that the merchants and former officials responsible for the forestry of the Moscow region acted as part of an organized criminal community (OPS), created using their official position (part 3 of article 210 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). Law enforcement authorities consider the former deputy chairman of the forestry committee of the region (Mosoblkomles), 58-year-old Alexander Prokopchenko, to be its organizer. 2016 and it was valid until the arrest of the defendants on November 30, 2021. The right hand of the official, according to investigators, was Natalya Nefedyeva, who at that time was the general director of the State Public Institution of the Moscow Region Mosoblles. The activities of the organization headed by her were supervised directly by Mr. Prokopchenko.
In addition to them, the OPS, according to investigators, included the former general director of Tsentrleskhoz Oleg Zhigarev, the ex-director of the Vinogradovsky branch of Mosoblles Boris Kuznetsov, as well as several other officials of Mosoblkomles and Mosoblles.
The task of the group, according to the Investigative Committee of Russia (TFR), included “unhindered registration of sites for the production of sanitary and recreational felling, as well as logging, including at the expense of budgetary funds on the lands of the forest fund of the Moscow region.”
The felling of commercial timber on the basis of fake acts of forest pathological surveys was directly carried out by Plitinvest LLC, which was headed by Denis Nefedyev, the son of Natalia Nefedyeva. It was his company that, in the vast majority of cases, won the tenders held by Mosoblkomles and Tsentrleskhoz for the destruction of trees affected by bark beetles, and instead, according to the TFR, sawed down dozens of hectares of healthy forest near Moscow. Then the expensive wood, according to the investigation, was sold through accomplices-merchants to woodworking enterprises. , cohesion, organization, a clear distribution of roles between the participants, strict secrecy, discipline and execution of instructions from Prokopchenko, Nefedieva and unidentified persons.”
The OPS, according to investigators, functioned on the territory of Ramensky, Orekhovo-Zuyevsky, Shatursky, Noginsky, Yegorevsky, Voskresensky, Sergiev Posadsky, Dmitrovsky and other urban districts of the Moscow region. At the moment, law enforcement authorities consider five episodes of illegal logging to be proven in the area of SNT “Tsvetmet” of the Orekhovo-Zuevsky urban district on an area of 5 hectares, SNT “Oncologist” near Shatura (4 hectares), SNT “Lazurnoe” near Voskresensk (20 hectares), as well as the garden partnership “Polyana” near Balashikha and the village of Bolshoe Gridino in the Yegoryevsk urban district (5 and 3 hectares, respectively).
From July to December 2018, according to investigators, at least 32 thousand cubic meters of wood worth at least 600 million rubles, which the defendants distributed among themselves.
We also note that Alexander Prokopchenko is also charged with taking bribes (part 6 of article 290 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). According to the TFR, the ex-official took money from the heads of the branches of Tsentrleskhoz “for general patronage and not imposing penalties on the part of the Forestry Committee of the Moscow Region, as well as not bringing to administrative responsibility.”
The lawyer of the accused Zhigarev, Konstantin Rogozin, told Kommersant that the investigation had no reason to include the defendants in this case in the OPS. According to the defense counsel, this was done solely in order to keep the accused in custody for a period of more than a year.
“The very position of the investigation about the existence of an event of the incriminated acts, as well as the involvement of my client in them, which is expressed in the vagueness of the charges brought, raises objections,” said Mr. Rogozin. “The incriminated logging was legal in nature. Nobody disputed them. The fact that the forest needed complete sanitary cleaning was also confirmed by inspectors from the forestry department for the Central Federal District. The problem lies in the fact that there are no approved methods for assessing the viability of felled trees. In our opinion, the arguments of the investigation about the damage caused are based on a false conclusion of experts from a commercial organization, who in fact did not even go to the forest areas, made many methodological and arithmetic errors. The defense side filed a motion to conduct a forestry expertise in a state forensic institution, but the investigation refused.”
The defense of other defendants refrained from commenting.
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