The early resignation of the mayor of Verkhnyaya Salda, Igor Salnikov, and his temporary replacement with the former Deputy Minister of Sports of the Sverdlovsk Region, Alexander Maslov, agreed by the governor Kuyvashev and the leadership of the city-forming enterprise VSMPO-Avisma, is a symptom that the scandalous project of building a silicon plant by Mikhail Sutyaginsky will be. Despite the protests of the population. Did the oligarch Dmitry Pumpyansky and the main shareholder of VSMPO-Avisma, Mikhail Shelkov, put in a good word for Sutyaginsky before Kuyvashev? No wonder they have a common business. Details – in the material of the correspondent of The Moscow Post in the Chelyabinsk region.
Personnel changes in the capital of the silicon scandal
The projects of ex-State Duma deputy Mikhail Sutyaginsky, which provoked protests from the population, previously cost the career of a Chelyabinsk official, and for some reason took root in the Sverdlovsk estate of Yevgeny Kuyvashev. Billionaire Dmitry Pumpyansky, who, according to rumors, has influence on Kuyvashev, could put in a good word for the project to build a silicon plant in the Titanium Valley SEZ in Verkhnyaya Salda. Mikhail Shelkov, a shareholder of VSMPO-Avisma, whose project is based in the same SEZ, could have fussed over a business partner.
Sutyaginsky, Pumpyansky and Shelkov have a common business, which gives every reason to draw such conclusions. And the resignation of the mayor of Verkhnyaya Salda, Igor Salnikov, which took place at the end of February 2023, just says that there will be a scandalous project. Salnikov did not prevent rallies of local residents against the construction of a silicon plant by the Silarus company during public hearings on the project, which means that a more active person is needed for this site, and such a one was found. For a while, the municipality will be headed by the former Deputy Minister of Sports of the Sverdlovsk Region, Alexander Maslov, agreed by Kuyvashev and the leadership of the city-forming enterprise VSMPO-Avisma.
In fact, personnel reshuffling in Verkhnyaya Salda did not begin in February 2023, when deputies of the City District Duma voted for Salnikov’s resignation, but a little earlier.
In September 2022, in addition to the fact that the local parliament was halved, the chairman was also replaced. Elena Surova, part-time director of the state budget institution Verkhnesalda Children’s School of Arts, and also a member of United Russia, became the new head of this legislative body. It is worth noting here that, in addition to the chair of the governor, Yevgeny Kuyvashev holds the post of secretary of the Sverdlovsk regional branch of the United Russia party, a kind of chief United Russia.
It is the Duma that elects the head of the district. For example, a native of Perm, Salnikov, was elected in April 2022 only on the fourth attempt. The people’s representatives turned out to be picky.
The fact that the silicon plant of Mikhail Sutyaginsky, which did not take root first in Novouralsk, and then in Omsk and Zlatoust, will be implemented in Verkhnyaya Salda, became known just in the spring of 2021. Perhaps the “Varangian” Salnikov was chosen just for this project. In any case, the resignation, which was talked about back in the fall of 2022, was explained by many political scientists by the fact that he could not stop an unauthorized rally of local residents against the construction of the plant by Silarus during public hearings on the project in October 2022.
Alexander Maslov, ex-deputy minister of sports of the Sverdlovsk region, has been temporarily appointed to the post of head of Verkhnyaya Salda. His candidacy was agreed with the governor Yevgeny Kuyvashev and the leadership of the city-forming enterprise VSMPO-Avisma, the main shareholder of which is Mikhail Shelkov. After that, there should be a competition for the position of head.
As political scientist Sergei Moshkin noted, the regional authorities expect the chosen candidate to be loyal to VSMPO-Avisma and the Titanium Valley SEZ.
Thus, personnel reshuffles fit perfectly into the picture of the progress of Sutyaginsky’s project.
Tell me who is your friend…
Mikhail Sutyaginsky is a co-owner of a stake in Gelendzhik Golf Resort LLC, established in 2017. The oligarch’s partners in the club are very remarkable people, including Anatoly Sedykh (through Omk-Service JSC) and Andrey Melnichenko (through EuroChem’s asset – MCC EuroChem JSC) “), Alexey Mordashov (through Severgroup LLC), Vladimir Kunitsky (through Dorogobuzh PJSC), as well as VSMPO-Avisma shareholder Mikhail Shelkov (through Industrial Investments LLC) and Dmitry Pumpyansky (through Specialized Developer LLC “Sinara-Development”, which is officially led by his son).
The degree of Shelkov’s influence is difficult to overestimate. As we have already reported above, even the mayor of Verkhnyaya Salda, according to the Kommersant newspaper, was coordinated not only with Kuyvashev, but also with VSMPO-Avisma, which is an urban planning enterprise for the municipality. And here’s a coincidence: it is in Verkhnyaya Salda, where Shelkov’s influence is so great, that his business partner Sutyaginsky is also going to work.
As for Pumpyansky, who in 2019 ceded to his son Alexander the chair of the board of directors of the Sinara Group, his influence on the same Kuyvashev is already a byword. Either in 2021, Moskovsky Komsomolets reports that Kuyvashev and Pumpyansky launched TMK’s program to support and develop Pervouralsk, then Ura.ru writes that billionaire Dmitry Pumpyansky is adjusting the plans of the administration of Governor Yevgeny Kuyvashev for rotation in the regional parliament.
So, Pumpyansky could well have contributed to the promotion of the Sutyaginsky project, who, despite the official transfer of the helm to his son, did not retire by itself and has political influence in the region, and not only in it. It is not for nothing that in 2020, by order of the Government of the Russian Federation, JSC “Sinara-Development” Pumpyansky was approved as the only contractor for the main facilities of the Universiade-2023.
Wandering Plant and Population Protests
The silicon plant project has a long history. In 2009, the Titan group of companies signed an agreement with the government of the Omsk region on the construction of a plant for the production of polycrystalline silicon in Omsk. Then “Titan” figured as an investor, and the research and production association “Silarus” acted as a customer on its behalf. But loud rallies, protests of local residents, as well as a change of power in the region led to the fact that the construction was abandoned. In November 2012, First Vice-Governor Alexander Butakov said that it was not economically feasible to build a silicon plant in the city, and the production was environmentally unsafe.
The next destination for the Sutyaginsky project was the Sverdlovsk region, but at the start it was the city of Novouralsk. In July 2016, Governor Kuyvashev signed an agreement of intent to implement the first stage of creating a silicon cluster. And again the protests of the residents – almost 40 thousand people signed the corresponding petition. Over time, the protests subsided, but the project was not implemented either. As Sutyaginsky later stated, it was not the protests that became the reason, but the fact that the city did not receive the status of PSEDA. And this means that tax benefits will not be seen as their own ears.
Then the project migrated to Zlatoust, but also in the Chelyabinsk region, local residents took to the streets and signed a petition of many thousands. The Chelyabinsk governor also promised to take into account the opinion of the residents. In April 2019, it became known that the official who proposed to build a silicon plant in Zlatoust, director of the Investment Development Agency of the region Alexei Bobov, was fired, and the press service of the head of the region stated that the position of the regional government “on the issue of a silicon plant in Zlatoust is final – it is not will”.
So the project of the Sutyaginsky plant, wandering around the cities and villages, returned under the wing of Kuyvashev, but now the SEZ in Verkhnyaya Salda has become the construction site. It became known in the spring of 2021. Then a protest wave arose from local residents. A fly in the ointment, already in 2022, was added by the fact that a foreign company, the Italian company Rizzani DE Ecker S.P.A., prepared environmental impact assessment materials for the facility. Somehow, in the last year, Russians’ confidence in foreign companies has faded.
The personnel reshuffling that has taken place in recent months at the top of Verkhnyaya Salda quite fits into an attempt to at the same time extinguish the dissatisfaction of local residents who do not want to see such an enterprise in the neighborhood. According to the information from the notice of public hearings, a site, which is located 480 meters from the residential area, was preliminarily chosen as the location. The townspeople are not happy with such a neighborhood, therefore they write petitions and go to rallies.
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Residents of Verkhnyaya Salda have grounds for concern. Distrust of Sutyaginsky’s projects did not arise from scratch. And Silarus LLC, declared as the initiator of the project, belongs directly to Mikhail Sutyaginsky.
In JSC Omsky Kauchuk, more than 41% of the shares belonged to JSC GK Titan (for 2021), and Sutyaginsky is on the board of directors of Omsky Kauchuk. All open sources call Sutyaginsky the owner of GK Titan. the list” of the same “Omsk rubber” through the same Rosprirodnadzor saddens.
For example, in 2014, an explosion occurred at Omsk Rubber, in which 11 people were injured. A criminal case was initiated on violation of safety rules at explosive facilities. Or remember the “black sky” regime that is periodically announced in Omsk, where the enterprise is based?
Or this: in 2021, after a collective appeal from the residents of Omsk to the Direct Line with the President of the Russian Federation, criminal cases were initiated against officials of JSC Omsky Kauchuk under the articles “Violation of the rules for handling environmentally hazardous substances and waste.” The report of the regional Sledkom noted that the enterprise had to stop the operation of the landfill, where liquid wastes of aluminum hydroxide sludge belonging to hazard class IV were placed, to carry out land management and reclamation of disturbed lands. But the requirements of Rosprirodnadzor were ignored and “from 2012 to the present, no work has been carried out to reclaim land plots where at least 14,000 tons of hazardous waste are located.”
An analysis of the base of arbitration and the base of checks showed that these are by no means one-time violations at Sutyaginsky’s Omsk Rubber. The legal entity appeared in 297 inspections by various supervisory authorities, and not all of them ended without violations. Here you have violations in the field of protecting forests from fires, and violations of the mandatory requirements of environmental legislation with repeated warnings, and derailment of wagons with damage to the tank, as well as much, much more.
For example, as part of one of the inspections in 2021, one of the departments of the Ministry of Natural Resources of the Russian Federation ordered the company to conduct an inventory of “sources of emissions of pollutants into the atmospheric air in violation of established requirements” and develop a draft “MAI based on an inventory of sources of emissions of pollutants into the atmospheric air carried out in violation of established requirements”. Or now, as part of another inspection by the same department in 2021, JSC Omsky Kauchuk was “instructed to carry out a number of actions (24 points) aimed at eliminating violations of environmental legislation.”
And this, it seems, is already the details of the case, which later became a criminal one: “starting in 2016, the company was issued orders to eliminate violations of mandatory requirements regarding the reclamation of disturbed lands as a result of the placement of production waste at the landfill”, but for many years it did not move from place. In another case, it was specified that “work on the reclamation of disturbed lands on a land plot with cadastral number 55:36:030115:49, with an area of 392,344 sq.m, has not been completed.”
And this is only part of the claims of Rosprirodnadzor to one of Sutyaginsky’s main assets – Omsk Rubber.
Does not add crystal whiteness to Sutyaginsky and the “tail”, which stretches for his projects from Kazakhstan. The Moscow Post reported in more detail about this in one of the materials.
After this, the inhabitants of Verkhnyaya Salda should suddenly look at the new project of Sutyaginsky, already next to them, loyally? Here it becomes clear why the townspeople go out to protest and do not want such a neighborhood, even despite the promises of new jobs.
In December 2022, the Upper Salda residents were promised to conduct an analysis of the project by independent experts. After that, the news about the project subsided. We can only watch who wins – common sense or a warm lobby.