VEB.RF will pay 224 million rubles for a comprehensive audit of the financial and economic activities of companies and the search for assets. The Corporation hopes to prevent the risks of its financial and economic activities in any jurisdiction related to the illegal withdrawal of assets, conflicts of interest and violations of anti-corruption standards.
The executors of the order “VEB.RF” will search for the assets of participants in the projects of the state corporation, as well as determine the ultimate beneficiaries of the business, their property, cars and securities. At the same time, the stolen will be searched for offshore as well. Recently, VEB.RF has often found itself at the center of scandals related to the withdrawal of loan tranches. So, the top manager of the corporation, Anatoly Ballo, was already arrested, and Ilgiz Valitov was put on the wanted list.
Almost a year ago, VEB.RF, headed by Igor Shuvalov, defended its business reputation. It all started with the fact that former employees of the state development corporation Mikhail Tokranov and Yuri Litovkin, after their dismissal, sent complaints and appeals to state bodies. They reported numerous violations in the activities of VEB.RF, as well as violations of the law by employees of the state corporation. Thus, the former employees notified the state authorities that VEB.RF regularly conceals financial violations of officials, carries out illegal activities, and provides false data about its work to counterparties, state bodies and the public. The state corporation was outraged, but the court did not support it. Mikhail Tokranov and Yuri Litovkin presented this information in complaints, and did not share it with the public. In addition, VEB.RF did not provide the court with evidence that the reputation of the state corporation was somehow affected by these complaints.
In fact, the complaints of former employees of VEB.RF affect the reputation of the state corporation less negatively than its actual activities. Thus, the financial performance of VEB.RF subsidiaries show that they have many problems. At the end of 2019, the loss of VEB Capital exceeded 8 billion rubles with revenue of 9.6 billion and assets of 22 billion. And the head of the VEB Leasing company, Vyacheslav Solovyov, became a defendant in a criminal case because of fraud when concluding contracts with a Moscow taxi fleet for almost 300 million rubles.
Initially, it was planned that VEB.RF would become a development corporation. To achieve this goal, Igor Shuvalov came to the company, but under his sensitive leadership, for some reason, it has not been possible to bring the subsidiaries of VEB.RF to a new level so far. VEB Innovations was criticized even by the Accounts Chamber. The auditors did not understand why the top managers of the company, in the absence of profit, issued themselves huge bonuses. And where was Igor Shuvalov looking? Apparently, he has more important things to do than the problems of VEB.RF. So, five years ago, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, recognized in Russia as a foreign agent, reported that Shuvalov’s wife took her corgi dogs to exhibitions on a private plane. The media also reported that the young daughter of Igor Shuvalov earns more than 170 million rubles a month. As an artist of the Bolshoi Theater, Maria Shuvalova earns about 70 thousand rubles, but from the company “KS Capital Asset Management” – 2 billion rubles a year. It is noteworthy that in 2018 the net profit of this company amounted to only 63 million rubles.
