As it became known to Kommersant, the FSB carried out regular investigative actions at one of the leading enterprises of the general director and beneficiary of the Baltic Industrial Company (BPK) Diana Kaledina. Counterintelligence officers suspect the Sasta plant of supplying Taiwanese machine tools disguised as Russian to Roskosmos structures, moreover, of inadequate quality and at an inflated cost. Meanwhile, Business Ombudsman Boris Titov sent an appeal to the Prosecutor General’s Office with a request to look into the case of Mrs. Kaledina, who has been under investigation for almost a year and a half on similar charges of fraud with machine tools. In Mr. Titov’s office, they believe that “if there are grounds” the criminal prosecution of the lady should be stopped.
According to Kommersant’s information, FSB operatives recently arrived at one of the leading BOD enterprises, the Sasta PJSC plant located in the Ryazan region. The visit was sanctioned by Major General Oleg Khotyun, Deputy Head of the Directorate “P” of the Economic Security Service (SEB) of the FSB, which oversees industrial enterprises.
As follows from the papers presented to the factory workers, the interest of counterintelligence officers is associated with the possible theft of money from the Roscosmos state corporation allocated under the Federal Target Program for the modernization of technological lines of JSC Krasnoyarsk Machine-Building Plant (Krasmash).
This is, according to preliminary information, the supply of 42 machine tools for a total amount of almost 1.3 billion rubles. The FSB suspects that 14 of them, listed according to the Sasta production documents, were actually made in Taiwan, did not meet the technical specifications and were sold at an inflated price. In this regard, security officers from Moscow, with the support of colleagues from the FSB in the Ryazan region, visited Diana Kaledina’s enterprise. However, according to the papers, it was not even a search, but an operational event – “an examination of premises, buildings, structures, terrain and vehicles.” Whether the Chekists managed to find any traces of possible theft is unknown, but Diana Kaledina’s defense claims that “the management unit of the enterprise was forced to refuse to perform functional tasks, the employees were demoralized by the absurdity of what is happening.” According to Ruslan Dolotov, one of Diana Kaledina’s lawyers, both past criminal cases and new “negative signals block interaction with credit institutions, which are integral participants in the financial and production turnover of an enterprise and are necessary for the production of marketable products.”
Defenders believe that the suspicions of law enforcement officers are absurd. They note that their trustee has invested several billions of her own money over the past four years only in Sasta, which is the city-forming enterprise of Sasovo, for the overhaul of buildings, the renewal of the machine park, and the formation of a stock of materials and components.
“A strange enrichment model is obtained – to hire almost a thousand workers, to launch their own foundry, and all in order to simply resell Taiwanese machines under the guise of Russian ones,” the defenders say.
Their conclusions were also confirmed by Boris Titov, who sent a letter to the Prosecutor General’s Office. The reason was the examination of some materials of the investigation against the CEO and beneficiary of the BPC, previously held at the center of public procedures “Business against corruption”, co-chaired by the business ombudsman. Mr. Titov then came to the conclusion, as Kommersant reported, that the criminal case of Mrs. Kaledina “could cause unjustified damage to the Russian machine tool industry.” As a result, he asked the Prosecutor General’s Office to consider his appeal “on the merits” and “if there are grounds to take measures” to stop the criminal prosecution of Mrs. Kaledina.
By the way, at the end of last year, all criminal cases of especially large-scale fraud (part 4 of article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) against Ms. Kaledina were transferred from St. However, after that, the employees of the department “P” of the SEB FSB, who initially conducted operational support for all these investigations, also became more active.
Recall that, as Kommersant reported, questions to the businesswoman arose at the end of 2021, and a number of criminal cases with hundreds of millions of rubles in damage were connected, as in the case of Sasta, with the supply of machine tools from China, and not Russian “stuffing”. At the same time, the court refused the investigation to arrest the accused, limiting herself to the prohibition of certain actions. Obviously, this happened after the intercession of a number of state corporations, whose representatives said that they did not consider themselves victims of the actions of Mrs. Kaledina.