Bank “Trust” put up for sale for 2 billion rubles the largest poultry farm in the Urals “Komsomolskaya”. This is considered another attempt to clean up the Augean stables after the business activities of the deputy Oleg Kolesnikov. In the meantime, he himself is attracting state billions to a new project.
Chelyabinsk entrepreneur Oleg Kolesnikov acted as a collector of agricultural assets. At the dawn of capitalism, he was a stock broker, but he made a lot of money in the 90s in the pharmacy business. With the beginning of the 2000s, Kolesnikov began to actively buy up agricultural assets throughout the southern Urals – in the Perm Territory and the Chelyabinsk Region. The status of a deputy helped him in this: since 2005 he was a member of the regional parliament of the Chelyabinsk region, and since 2007, under the flag of the Liberal Democratic Party, he entered the State Duma (later Kolesnikov joined United Russia). By some coincidence, in 2007, Kolesnikov managed to privatize the same Komsomolskaya poultry farm, which until then had remained state property. A few years later, his holding included a variety of agricultural assets: poultry farms, pig farms, feed manufacturers. The result was a whole business empire with a closed production cycle. Then it might have seemed that Oleg Kolesnikov would soon join the list of the largest latifundists in Russia. But everything went according to a different scenario: the Healthy Farm success story turned into a grandiose scam and overgrown with criminal cases.
In 2016, it became known that Oleg Kolesnikov could not pay off loans with Sberbank. The local press wrote about the Healthy Farm debt to the bank of 1 billion rubles and a delay of 500 million in salaries and taxes. These debts were covered by the buyer of the assets, whom Kolesnikov found: Rusgrain Holding. Behind the company were several individuals, headed by the ex-owner of Binbank Mikhail Shishkhanov.
As soon as the new owners took the helm, a very unpleasant story surfaced. It turned out that murky schemes had been spinning inside the Healthy Farm for many years. 15 managers of various enterprises of the holding fell under criminal prosecution.
120 million scam
“According to the investigation, the defendants, being directors of various commercial enterprises that are part of the Healthy Farm agricultural holding, entered into contracts with commercial organizations for the construction of agricultural facilities,” said Natalya Mamaeva, senior assistant to the prosecutor of the Chelyabinsk region. “After the construction work was completed and the facilities were put into operation, no settlements were made with contractors, and the earmarked funds received from the bank for the construction of agricultural facilities were disposed of at their own discretion.”
Also in the criminal case, it was about the organization of a property “carousel” within the holding. Legal entities resold real estate objects in their circle several times, increasing the price over and over again. Then, under sham transactions, the firms received VAT refunds from the state budget.
Here is one vivid episode of those times. Healthy Farm attracted 88 contractors for the construction of the Rodnikovsky pig farm and the Kunashaksky poultry farm. Then the debts to the contractors were transferred to the legal entity Uralbroiler and they began to bankrupt it. The idea fell through after the personal intervention of Governor Mikhail Yurevich, but in 2014 he lost his post and fell into disgrace. So the contractors did not wait for their money.
As a result, the Healthy Farm criminal case turned out to be grandiose. The investigation reported 150 searches and seizures. Investigative actions were carried out in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, Samara regions and the Perm Territory. The volume of the criminal case is 215 volumes. True, the verdict never came, in 2018 the court returned the case to the prosecutor’s office. He agreed with the arguments of the defense about the numerous mistakes made by the investigation. Most of all, the contractors and counterparties of the Healthy Farm, who considered themselves deceived by a total of 120 million rubles, were indignant at that time.
We managed to find only one verdict in connection with the scams in Healthy Farm. Andrey Kupriyanov, the former legal adviser of Uralbroiler, received three years probation and a fine of 50,000 rubles for participating in a scheme to buy the Platoshinskaya poultry farm in the Perm Territory. According to the case file, Kupriyanov, in collusion with the management of the Healthy Farm agricultural holding, stole 95 million rubles from the budget from March 2012 to August 2014. We are talking about the return of VAT on the resale of property within the holding at an inflated price. It should be noted that the episodes included in the case relate to 2010-2014, when the Healthy Farm was under the control of Oleg Kolesnikov, but he himself did not appear in the criminal proceedings.
Offshore and “Classics”
Claims against Kolesnikov arose not from the investigators, but from the new owners of his business. Rusgrain Holding raked the Augean stables of the Healthy Farm for a short time. Mikhail Shishkhanov soon started having problems in the financial sector. Binbank, controlled by Shishkhanov, bought MDM Bank for $100 million, in whose capital a $900 million hole was discovered. As a result, Binbank fell under the reorganization of state-owned banks. The consequence of this was that the assets of “Rusgrain” came under the control of the state Bank “Trust”. And here new details about the “Healthy Farm” surfaced.
Trust managers tried to figure out the withdrawal of 414 million rubles from the agricultural holding. The scheme was described as follows. In September 2015, the Chelyabinsk Proftehstroy LLC (one of the legal entities of the Healthy Farm) in favor of the Cypriot Chromsys Ltd. bills were issued in the amount of 413.9 million rubles. Since 2019, they have been owned by someone Igor Kopylov. He appealed to the Kurchatovskiy District Court of Chelyabinsk with a demand for the recovery of funds. There were suspicions that Kopylov was connected with Oleg Kolesnikov. And at one time, he allegedly sent bills to Cyprus in order to corny be able to then withdraw funds from the agricultural holding. There is no open information about the criminal prospects of this episode, which can be easily explained by the parliamentary immunity of Oleg Kolesnikov. However, it is known that in 2021 the Arbitration Court of the Chelyabinsk Region, at the suit of the Trust structures, arrested the property of the family of deputy Kolesnikov for 414 million rubles during a dispute over promissory notes. The paradox of the situation is that, according to the official declaration of deputy Kolesnikov, his family does not even have their own real estate – an apartment for rent and a house for use. Cars are not mentioned at all in the declaration. What in this case arrested the court?
Someone may recall the deputy’s share in the Classics pharmacy chain. Since the 90s, this structure has been led by the wife of the deputy Lena Kolesnikova, a regional deputy and chairman of the congress of Tatars in the Chelyabinsk region. However, everything is not smooth here either. By 2017, the once flourishing business was under competitive management. The bankruptcy procedure went through legal entities that were engaged in the wholesale supply of medicines. They were unable to repay debts to counterparties for more than 1 billion rubles. At the same time, the bankruptcy trustee found 337 million outstanding receivables. In general, the situation with pharmacies resembles the story of the Healthy Farm. There is no end in sight to the string of lawsuits in both bankruptcy stories. For example, Healthy Farm filed lawsuits against four former directors for the recovery of 637.2 million rubles. We are talking about compensation for additional tax charges that the Federal Tax Service made to the agricultural holding. In addition, “the actual absence of real estate objects declared in the documents with a book value of more than 300 million rubles was discovered.”
All these scandals did not prevent Oleg Kolesnikov from becoming a State Duma deputy from the Chelyabinsk region in 2021. This would hardly have been possible without the support of the region’s governor Alexei Teksler. Without the assistance of the regional authorities, Kolesnikov would hardly have been able to start a new business project (however, they say that he is registered with his mother-in-law) – the construction of a multifunctional shopping and entertainment center in Chelyabinsk under the working name “Tarelka”. It includes retail space, a hotel and a water park. The project was presented in February 2021. Since then, its value has more than doubled – from 2 to 5.2 billion rubles. Most of the time that has passed since then, the construction was at the foundation stage, but now towering building structures are already visible on the site, writes the local newspaper Delovoy Kvartal. It is assumed that the state corporation “Tourism.RF” will enter the capital of the project. However, taking into account the previous business experience of Oleg Kolesnikov, it becomes scary for state billions.
By the way
Deputy Oleg Kolesnikov announced back in the autumn that he was going to the NVO zone. Returning three months later on a visit, he told his fellow countrymen that he was fighting in the BARS “Cascade”. It is known from open sources that this unit has many VIP soldiers, and it is engaged in aerial reconnaissance using drones.