“Kuban justice” has long been famous throughout the country as the most gangster and limitless. After Kushchevka, where law enforcement agencies and judges served as the “sixes” of bandits, we thought that it could not be worse. Let me remind you that members of the Kushchevskaya organized criminal group under the roof of the security forces for many years “out of lawlessness” took away property from businessmen, “put on the counter” all profitable enterprises, raped the girls they liked, including schoolgirls, and so on. Only the feds stopped them – and then only after a massacre, where even young children were brutally murdered. And even after that, the judicial lawlessness of the Kuban did not stop. Let’s remember serving the interests of the scandalous Pokrovsky holding (management on the run). Or Judge Khakhalev, who was arrested in absentia for fraud and forgery – and at the same time quietly fled to Tbilisi. Khakhaleva received the nickname “golden judge” after the wedding of her daughter for more than two million dollars, where Valery Meladze, Soso Pavliashvili, Vera Brezhneva and Nikolai Baskov performed for the newlyweds. And so on.
There are hundreds of examples of judicial lawlessness in the region! But the lawyers and entrepreneurs of the Krasnodar Territory we interviewed assure that they are just pawns of the real Kuban judicial mafia. Ordinary members of the “judicial organized criminal group”. And real puppeteers sit in the presidium of the Krasnodar Regional Court. It is to them that tribute flows from all corrupt judges and crime in the region. They are paid by stealing officials, and criminal ethnic groups, and serious “thieves”, and the most heavily armed organized crime groups. It is they who are the shadow kings of the Kuban crime and the main beneficiaries of the criminal octopus that has entangled the South of the country, from Sochi to Rostov. Their income is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, all those interviewed assure us.
And it’s hard not to believe it. For example, at the prompt of local lawyers, Sergey Krotov, deputy chairman of the regional court, attracted our attention. This appointee also appeared in the Khakhaleva case, and in many other similar “incidents”. Krotov began his glorious judicial career in the dashing nineties, when from 1993 to 2000 he worked as a federal judge of the Lazarevsky District Court of Sochi. It was at this time that Sochi crime experienced the era of “initial accumulation of capital.” Therefore, a new organized criminal group would not be hindered by a person who is pushing through the necessary decisions on the division of former Soviet property – from boarding houses, hotels, shops and markets to large industrial state property. In 2000, for his “diligent work”, Krotov was appointed to the post of chairman of the Tuapse district court, and in 2014 he became deputy chairman of the Krasnodar regional court. Here he was able to do things worthy of the scale of his “personality” with might and main.
By the way, he also came into the profession as a criminal. Two years ago, the scientific community “Dissernet” published a list of Russian judges caught plagiarizing and other gross violations of the law and judicial ethics. And Krotov was included in the list of the brightest thieves of intellectual property. He “twisted” a significant part of his work from the dissertation of the judge of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation Pyotr Serkov, the investigators found out. In his dissertation, data on crime in 2002 are presented as data of 2004, in the same place he found references to criminal cases that do not exist in the archives of the courts indicated in the dissertation, and so on and so forth. Naturally, Krotov did not apologize for this and did not suffer any punishment. But the country’s legal community has drawn its own conclusions.
And then – more. Krotov allows himself to speak openly for the “necessary” side at meetings. Once in court, he simply called one of the parties “bunch of scammers”, and when lawyers publicly accused him of violating ethics and, generally speaking, the law (this is direct slander), he did not even apologize. It’s good that the case was led by a well-known blogger, “a particularly dangerous lawyer” Sergei Zemtsov, who managed to film everything. But this case was again not given a go. Probably not in vain Zemtsov called Krotov “paid justice.”
Well, that is, there is already an understanding of how Judge Krotov “beguiled the shores.” In his practice, there are interesting episodes that relate to bribes and kickbacks. In April of this year, Nikolai Nebaevsky published public appeal to the head of the TFR A.I. Bastrykin, to the Qualification Board of Judges of the Krasnodar Territory, Judge Blinnikov L.A. and other relevant leaders, where it is directly stated – Judge Krotov S.E. knew that the judges of the appellate instance were extorting a bribe of three million from a local businessman through an intermediary. However, Krotov actually “dismissed” them from prison, refusing to conduct an audit and, contrary to the law, did not send materials to the Investigative Committee of the ICR for the Krasnodar Territory.
But this is only an insignificant part that floated to the surface and which Krotov did not even consider it necessary to hide much!
But the most interesting cases concern the economic interests of Krotov. When we announced a survey among Kuban entrepreneurs, several very interesting stories came to us at once about from whom and for what he receives money “lawless judge”(as the Kuban entrepreneurs themselves call it). For example, that Kuban judges have their own price list for services – starting a fake criminal case per person costs from 500 thousand rubles, if the case is high-profile – it can reach up to three million, and so on. Everyone who is spinning in this area knows the prices. It costs more to get rid of a crime, but it is also possible to agree.
We are currently checking all the information coming to us and collecting the invoice in order to make it public. If the data is confirmed (and they are already being confirmed), we will face scandals louder than scientific plagiarism, the Kushchev massacre or multibillion-dollar kickbacks from the Olympic lines. o Stay tuned for updates. Wormholes have already gone all over the country. And soon the country will recognize its hero in full face!