The Khamovniki Court of Moscow sentenced to three years in prison conditionally the former adviser to the general director of the state corporation Rosatom and the former head of the State Duma committee on ecology Vladimir Grachev in a criminal case of fraud, the press service of the court told Interfax.
He was also fined 500 thousand rubles and banned for two years “to engage in activities related to expert, scientific support of state bodies and organizations, the provision of advisory services to state bodies and organizations performing expert functions.”
Grachev was found guilty of attempted particularly large-scale fraud (part 3 of article 30 of the Criminal Code – part 4 of article 159 of the Criminal Code).
He was detained in September 2020 and placed under house arrest.
The investigation and the court established that Grachev demanded a total of several tens of millions of rubles from businessmen whose company is engaged in waste processing in order to promote the interests of the enterprise. The media reported that it was about 87 million rubles.
The website of the public council of Rosatom stated that Grachev was an adviser to the general director of the state corporation. He was also the head of the State Duma committee on ecology, he was a deputy of the third and fourth convocations of the Duma in 1999-2007. He is Doctor of Technical Sciences, Professor, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Department of Physical Chemistry). He was awarded the Order of Honor, the Order of Merit for the Fatherland IV degree.
“Kommersant”, 07/23/2022, “The colony did not fit the age of the Honored Ecologist”: It followed from the verdict that Vladimir Grachev, being president of the Russian Ecological Academy (REA), corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and head of the Greenlight interregional environmental organization, turned in March 2018 to the head of RT-Invest Andrey Shipelov with a proposal to conclude an agreement on promotion of his company. […] For these services, Vladimir Grachev requested 6 million rubles. Mr. Shipelov agreed with this proposal, and after concluding an agreement with Vladimir Grachev, LLC GK-1, which was part of RT-Invest, transferred the agreed amount to the account indicated by the environmentalist. […] However, on August 22, Mr. Shipelov notified that he was unilaterally terminating the agreement. […] In February 2020, the ecologist organized a meeting of the members of the RAS Scientific Council on Global Ecology, at which the secretary of the meeting distributed questionnaires to scientists, asking them to evaluate the waste incineration method adopted by RT-Invest. Moreover, the questions were formulated in such a way that it was almost impossible to answer them positively. As a result, the conclusion was negative. […]
Mr. Shipelov contacted Vladimir Grachev and asked to hold another meeting of the scientific council in order to level the previous conclusion. For this, according to the materials of the case, Vladimir Grachev requested 87 million rubles. At the same time, the scientist demanded that 6 million rubles be personally transferred to him, another 9 million rubles. transferred to a “controlled structure”, and the rest of the amount was transferred to the account of the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia (PFUR), where the scientist also headed the Department of Ecology. Mr. Shipelov considered this offer to be extortion and filed a complaint with the FSB. — Inset K.ru