The criminal case of embezzlement during the reconstruction of the “Switzerland” park may lead investigators to the offices of the administration of the head of the region, Gleb Nikitin.
In the Nizhny Novgorod region, a court arrested three people in a case of fraud on an especially large scale during the improvement of the Switzerland park. The former representative of the city customer, the ex-head of the MCU “GlavUKS” of Nizhny Novgorod, Sergey Kuklaev, as well as two middle managers of the general contractor company, GK “EKS” – Roman Asabin and Petr Sedelnikov, were sent to the pre-trial detention center.
They are suspected in the theft of 41.5 million rubles, but the public is outraged: it believes that there could be much more abuse in a project worth almost 3.7 billion rubles. In any case, this is a powerful image failure of the main ideologist and lobbyist of the project – Nizhny Novgorod Governor Gleb Nikitin.
The correspondent of The Moscow Post in the Nizhny Novgorod region dealt with the situation with the reconstruction of the park.
The reconstruction of the “Switzerland” park was presented as one of the largest and image projects of Nikitin's current cadence. It was a kind of gift to the city for the celebration of the 800th anniversary. But problems and scandals began from the very beginning of the project.
“Swiss” beneficiaries
As for the current case, the investigators believe that the contractor laid a rubber coating in the park that did not meet the design values, and the alleged attackers pocketed the difference.
In this story, the representative of the authorities, albeit a former one, Sergey Kuklaev looks more like a “shooter”. The point is the scale of the work and the customer – the EKS Group of Companies from the Yaroslavl Region. This structure is an elite developer, actively working in Moscow and St. Petersburg. But there is still no reliable information about its beneficiaries in the public domain.
Formally, 100% of the shares are owned by Alexei Vlasov. He is also the CEO of the company. However, the register of shareholders is hidden by its holder – JSC “Independent Registrar Company R.O.S.T.”.
According to evil tongues, an entrepreneur from the Yaroslavl region, Yury Kogtev, may be the real beneficiary of the structure. His father-in-law, Nikolai Krylov, must be well acquainted with the former Deputy Prime Minister, and now the head of Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov.
Previously, the network suggested that the EKS is controlled by people close to the former governor of the Yaroslavl region Dmitry Mironov. It was under him that the company in Yaroslavl began to receive large government contracts. And then, when the government urgently needed to find an investor for the bankrupt distillery “Yaroslavsky”, “suddenly” Ekaterina Kogteva, who may be Yuri's close relative, “suddenly” got 50%.
There were other rumors – allegedly for the company may be the Rotenbergs, or someone from the Moscow government of Sergei Sobyanin. There are divisions in the CEN, incl. in Tver. In 2015-2017, Maxim Krylov was the owner of the Tver EKS.
Then the company was 99% offshore from Belize Lombardi Corporation. In addition, in 2013-2014 The owner of the company was the Cypriot White Wings Holdings Limited. According to the Daily Storm, all correspondence of the company was handled by Kinanis LLC, which also served the interests of the Rotenberg family in offshore jurisdictions.
Those. the company may have influential patrons. In 2018, she won a tender for repair and restoration work in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior (ХХС) in Moscow for almost 1.5 billion rubles.
In the same year, she won a contract for the construction of a deep-sea pier for LLC complex “Zvezda” for 2 billion rubles. Also, the Zvezdochka Ship Repair Center signed several contracts with the company earlier. Obviously, no one would be entrusted with such work, and the total amount of state contracts of the structure exceeded 213 billion rubles.
Photo: Rusprofile .en
It may very well be that the “Switzerland” park was also considered as one of the largest , landmark projects, and Gleb Nikitin could “support” the structure's influential beneficiaries.
Nature doesn't count
From the beginning, the deputies of Nizhny Novgorod held a closed meeting of the City Duma: they decided to withdraw part of the park's land from protection in order to cut down trees and build offices. But unauthorized protests of caring people began in the city, and soon the decision was canceled. Instead, they announced a competition for the development of an improvement project for 160 million rubles.
Already at this stage, the project was actively lobbied not even by Mayor Yuri Shalabaev (GlavUKS is a municipal structure after all), but by Governor Gleb Nikitin. And the winner-designer was, as you may have guessed, the same EKS Group of Companies.
But when the projects and estimates were drawn up (many had questions about them – some shops cost 70 thousand rubles apiece), a competition was held for the implementation of the project, which was won by SSU-5 from St. Petersburg. But it is not clear on what grounds the CEN was able to cancel the results of the first competition, and won the second one!
And at about the same time, another scandal erupted – the FAS found JSC GC “EKS” guilty of a cartel conspiracy to maintain prices at once at 428 auctions in Moscow. Together with the structure, JSC FG “Everest”, LLC “Asterplast” and LLC “EKS” fell into the field of view of the antimonopolists.
This alone leads us to the question, did Governor Gleb Nikitin lead such a principled campaign? for a hand in the reconstruction project Switzerland, and could he have a personal commercial interest in this?
The residents had their own interests – they wanted to keep an ecologically clean space within the proud. The park's reconstruction project, which involved, among other things, cutting down trees, was opposed by city activists and environmentalists. They even created the Board of Trustees of the park.
According to the authors of the Reporter-NN website, allegedly in September 2021, i.e. after the completion of the reconstruction, activists from the Board of Trustees explored the first 200 meters of the park along the fence. It turned out that two-thirds of the trees were damaged, and that's not counting the destroyed ones.
The park was finished and opened with great fanfare, but at what cost? Photo: https://srb62.ru/2020/03/18/v-nizhegorodskom-parke-shvejtsariya-postroyat-unikalnyj-invandrom/
It is not surprising that even at the stage of work, people lined human chains unauthorized by the authorities along Gagarin Avenue, which is located opposite the park, in order to express their disagreement. People were confident that the project could be implemented with violations of regional and environmental laws. And some objects in the park should not be at all.
For example, they planned to build a center for the disabled, an eco-school, a children's center, and reading rooms in the park, the construction of which, according to activists, violated the provisions of the regional law “On the Protection of Green Areas in the Nizhny Novgorod Region.” And the laying of many engineering structures could cause irreparable harm to the roots of trees and shrubs.
Governor Nikitin tried to calm the people. But it is precisely to calm, and not to resolve these contradictions. Then he said that the situation around the park was “unreasonably heated”, and promised to personally meet with people in order to prove the need for the reconstruction of “Switzerland” with the project in hand. Kommersant wrote about this.
Nikitin did not keep his promise, and the decisions were “pushed through” despite the disagreement of the inhabitants. As a result, the park was reconstructed, and the voices of those who disagreed were drowned in others – after all, the park turned out to be really beautiful and obviously pleased many Nizhny Novgorod residents. “include-img” loading=”lazy” title=”Rubber cut in Nizhny Novgorod Switzerland of Governor Nikitin” type=”image/png” alt=”Rubber cut in Nizhny Novgorod Switzerland of Governor Nikitin” />
The activist is trying to draw the attention of Gleb Nikitin to the problems of the reconstruction of the “Switzerland” park. Photo: https://reporter-nn.ru/analyst/swissbill_5800/
Only at what cost did the administration of Gleb Nikitin achieve this, if a criminal case erupted the following year after the opening of the park? scandal? And in his light, the motives of the head of the region, who dragged the project with all his might and shielded the “reenactors”, no longer seem so noble.
As evil tongues say, the allegedly current criminal case can only be the beginning. On the scale of Russian theft, 40 million on rubber tracks from a project of 3.7 billion looks like a ridiculous amount. But even at the design stage, the Nizhny Novgorod deputies feared that the project would turn into a “large-scale cut.”
Perhaps, the tongues of those arrested in the criminal case will untie, and they will point the finger at someone else – for example, from the administration of the head of the region , because both the Ministry of Construction and the Ministry of Natural Resources were supposed to monitor the progress of the work.
And who knows, maybe it is this criminal case and the park that will become the bump that his governorship will “stumble over”.