“Kommersant” became aware of the grounds on which the Volzhsky District Court of the Samara Region returned to the prosecutor’s office the materials of a high-profile criminal case on pollution of the Druzhba oil pipeline with organochlorine compounds. As it turned out, this was due to the replacement of lawyers and a number of violations, including an incorrectly drawn up charge against one of the defendants. In addition, the ICR will have to resolve the issue of merging two criminal cases on the Druzhba oil pipeline into one.
The materials of the criminal case on contamination of the Druzhba oil pipeline with organochlorine compounds were returned to the prosecutor’s office due to violations and new circumstances that were discovered during the trial. The decision was made on Thursday, April 20, by the Volzhsky District Court of the Samara Region.
In particular, as Dmitry Notarius, the lawyer of the accused party, explained to Kommersant, at the trial the defenders of the defendants, the general director of Nefteperevalka LLC Svetlana Balabay and the deputy director of Magistral LLC Sergey Balandin, were challenged.
“This was due to the fact that the lawyers of Balandin and Balabay represented the interests of other participants in the process, who were subsequently not charged, and they remained in the status of witnesses. Because of this, there was a challenge, and new defenders were allowed to participate in the process. Some procedural actions should be re-carried out with them, ”said the source of the publication.
Another reason for the return of the criminal case to the prosecutor’s office was the termination of the pre-trial cooperation agreement with Sergei Balandin.
Earlier, he agreed to cooperate with the investigation by concluding an appropriate deal with the prosecutor’s office, so the materials against him were separated into a separate proceeding and were to be considered in the Bogatovsky District Court in the village of Borskoy. However, later the investigation changed one of the charges against Sergei Balandin to a more serious one.
“If initially he was charged with Part 2 of Art. 210 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (organization of a criminal community or participation in it), then part 1 of the same article appeared in the final accusation, with which he, of course, did not agree, because it already provides for a twofold increase in punishment, up to 20 years of deprivation freedom. Since Sergei Balandin does not admit his guilt, there can be no special procedure for the consideration of the case, and, accordingly, he was incorrectly acquainted with the materials and evidence that were not provided to him in full. There is also the question of combining two cases into one,” said Dmitry Notary.
The incident at the Druzhba oil pipeline occurred in April 2019. First, the Belarusian “Belneftekhim” reported a sharp deterioration in the quality of oil from Russia, supplied through the pipeline, and then suspended the transit of Russian raw materials to Europe.
Then Transneft stated that the exported oil was deliberately contaminated with organochlorine compounds. Later, the Investigative Committee of Russia reported that low-quality oil entered the pipeline through an oil discharge unit located near the village of Nikolaevka, Volzhsky District, Samara Region.
The investigation of the criminal case was taken up by the investigating authorities of the TFR in the Samara region. According to the investigation, which was made public in May 2019, six suspects, including Svetlana Balabay, General Director of Nefteperevalka LLC, Rustam Khusnutdinov, Deputy General Director of Nefteperevalka LLC, Vladimir Zhogolev, General Director of Petroneft Aktiv LLC, and Deputy Director of Magistral LLC » Sergey Balandin, in the period from August 2018 to April 2019, as part of a criminal community, they committed multiple thefts of oil.
According to the security forces, in order to hide the theft, in March-April 2019, the defendants supplied oil with the addition of chlorine-containing compounds, which did not meet the requirements of GOST, to an oil discharge unit in the Samara region.
Subsequently, contaminated fuel ended up in an oil storage facility in the village of Lopatino, Volzhsky District, Samara Region. After that, eight tanks of the Lopatino park failed and contaminated oil entered the main pipeline system.
Then it became known about other suspects, among them was the head of the Lopatino acceptance point Roman Gladkov, who, according to investigators, illegally received from the management of Soyuz-Neft LLC for help with receiving a mixture of oil and refined products from Nefteperevalka “.
In addition, according to the investigation, Roman Gladkov and Sergey Balandin transferred illegal remuneration for inaction to another defendant in the case – Dmitry Nikishov, deputy head of the Kuibyshev district department of Transneft-Druzhba JSC for commodity and transport operations.
Depending on their roles, the defendants are charged with committing crimes such as intentional destruction or damage to property (part 2 of article 167 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), fraud (part 4 of article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), unauthorized connection to oil pipelines (article 215.3 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation ), commercial bribery (Article 204 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), as well as the organization of a criminal community or participation in it (Article 210 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation).
At the beginning of 2020, Svetlana Balabay, Rustam Khusnutdinov and Vladimir Zhogolev had their preventive measure reduced to a ban on certain actions. The court extended house arrest for Roman Gladkov.