A criminal case on cartel conspiracy at auction for the construction of communication lines in the Voronezh region for 901 million rubles was submitted to the Moscow court from Voronezh for consideration. Nine people will appear in the dock, including three former top managers of the regional branch of Rostelecom. According to the investigation, the provider’s employees developed and organized a scheme to limit competition at the auction, which led to a price reduction that was unprofitable for the state-owned company. The case was referred to the jurisdiction of the capital, since a trading floor is registered there.
The Central District Court of Voronezh sent to the Tushinsky District Court of Moscow a criminal case on cartel conspiracy at an auction to find a contractor for the construction of communication lines as part of the federal project “Information Infrastructure” for more than 900 million rubles. Judge Valentina Paradovskaya made this decision based on the fact that the crime, expressed, according to the investigation, in restricting competition, ended at the site of JSC Unified Electronic Trading Platform, located in the capital.
The criminal case was initiated three years ago. Then the employees of the GUEBiPK of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the FSB and their Voronezh colleagues conducted 24 searches in the Voronezh, Kursk, Belgorod, Kaluga and Volgograd regions, as well as in Moscow, including in the offices of Rostelecom. As a result, nine people must appear before the court. They were charged with restricting competition with causing especially large damage (part 2 of article 178 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, up to six years in prison).
The criminal case describes the events related to the search for contractors for the construction of communication lines in the Voronezh region as part of the federal project “Information Infrastructure” of the national program “Digital Economy of the Russian Federation”.
According to the investigation, in April 2019, the technical director of the Voronezh branch of PJSC Rostelecom, Maxim Yeremeev, decided to organize the corresponding electronic auction with an initial maximum contract price of 901.28 million rubles.
According to investigators, his motive was to improve his personal performance and the opportunity to receive promotion in the service, including in the form of additional bonuses for achieving high production results.
According to the case file, the manager of Rostelecom offered to participate in the auction to four entrepreneurs – the founder of Komstroy LLC Andrei Proskuryakov, the representative of Ikstelcom LLC Alexander Pankratov, the general director of Cross LLC Vladimir Zibrov and the head of Centertelecomstroy LLC Yuri Antipov. Businessmen, according to the investigation, expected to conclude an agreement at the highest possible price and therefore agreed. According to investigators, Oleg Starchenko, co-founder of SKS Prom LLC, Vyacheslav Litvinov, technical director of Smur Firm JSC, and Denis Marinets, representative of Aks Group LLC, joined the cartel. All of them, except Yuri Antipov, who died in 2021, were eventually charged with cartel conspiracy.
Maxim Eremeev also allegedly involved colleagues in the implementation of the plan – his deputy Andrey Akopyan and Andrey Belov, deputy director of the department for organizing the construction of centralized projects of the Center macro-regional branch of PJSC Rostelecom. The latter directly supervised the verification of the compliance of the submitted applications with the technical documentation of the procurement. According to investigators, he agreed on the phone with his colleague from Voronezh a list of contractors who could not be rejected from participating in the upcoming purchase.
As a result, bids were received from 13 companies from Voronezh, Moscow, Belgorod, Kaluga, Volgograd, Krasnodar and Samara in the form of an open request for quotations. According to the results of the rebidding, eight firms that offered the best price reduction coefficient were recognized as winners. Between them, contracts were distributed for the construction of a fiber-optic communication line, installation of equipment and commissioning for connecting socially significant objects to the Internet in more than 750 settlements of the Voronezh region. The cost of each contract amounted to 112.66 million rubles. The fall in prices as a result of the absence of real competition amounted to only 3.5%, which, according to the prosecution, “is the minimum and, therefore, unprofitable for Rostelecom PJSC”.
The investigation believes that representatives of the seven winning firms were not competitors, but partners.
With the help of smartphones confiscated during the searches, the investigators established that Andrey Akopyan, deputy technical director of the Voronezh branch of Rostelecom, created a WhatsApp group called “Torgii CE”, which included the accused. In addition to participating in the cartel, former employees of Rostelecom are accused of abuse of office (part 1 of article 286 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, up to four years in prison).
The prosecutor’s office of the Voronezh region told Kommersant that the department would not appeal the transfer of the criminal case to Moscow. It was not possible to promptly find out the attitude of the defendants in the case to the decision of Kommersant. At the preliminary investigation stage, none of them pleaded guilty.
