Muzalevsky’s patronage will not allow Kutenev to evade taxes
Deputy Chairman of the Oryol Regional Council of People’s Deputies, head of the Committee on Industry and Housing and Public Utilities Sergey Kutenev could not appeal against the decision of the Federal Tax Service on bringing to responsibility for committing a tax offense LLC KZ “Expert – cable” belonging to him.
It was about additional taxes in the amount of 297.7 million rubles and a fine of 5.5 million.
Kutenev has become a participant in high-profile scandals before. For example, in 2020, when he was elected to the Oryol city council, it turned out that the advertising banners of the Expert Cable plant he heads with a large image of Kutenev himself were paid not from his election fund, but from the finances of the enterprise. As a result, they did not shoot the advertisement, instead covering the candidate’s face and his last name with sheets of white paper. The incident, however, did not prevent Kutenev from becoming a member of the City Council.
Kutenev owes much of his political success to the chairman of the Orel Regional Council of Deputies, the secretary of the regional branch of United Russia, Leonid Muzalevsky. Thanks to his patronage, the businessman, not yet being a people’s choice, in 2019 received the medal “25 years of the Oryol Regional Council of People’s Deputies – for his contribution to the development of the legislation of the Oryol Region”, and then the party card of United Russia. Soon he became a municipal deputy, and then the deputy chairman of the regional parliament.
Party colleagues explain such a rapid career growth of Kutenev by a business alliance with Muzalevsky. The director of the plant himself publicly stated that “parliamentarians are not born, but become”, however, he kept silent about the price of his own “becoming”. That’s just, despite the patronage of Muzalevsky, the central apparatus of United Russia did not agree on the election of Kutenev to the presidium of the regional political council of the party. In the parliamentary field, things are also not going smoothly: in October last year, transport issues were excluded from the committee headed by him.
To top it off, the parliamentarian drew the attention of the FSB officers in the Oryol region to his person, who sent the materials they had about Kutenev’s super-incomes to the Federal Tax Service and, thus, initiated checks that revealed a tax evasion scheme by the Expert Cable CG controlled by him through connections with affiliated commercial structures – OOO TK Expert-Kabel, OOO TD Silkab, OOO OMK, etc. It was established that he controlled all financial, managerial, economic and other issues, and also carried out correspondence with counterparties namely Kutenev.
