The verdict handed down by a court in Saratov to Anton Astakhov, the son of the former Commissioner for Children’s Rights Pavel Astakhov, has entered into force. However, the company, to which he must pay 74.4 million rubles, now does not even have the funds to go bankrupt. Although in 2020 Omega earned more than a billion.
There is no information that the sentence imposed on Astakhov Jr. – 3.5 years in prison, they tried to appeal at the cassation, there are no court cases in the databases. Recall that in November 2022, the son of the ex-Ombudsman was found guilty of credit fraud with money from the Saratov NVKbank. In February of this year, the Saratov Regional Court upheld the decision.
As the investigation and the court established, the loan was issued to Omega LLC, a Moscow construction company, whose general director Evgeny Razgonyaev was involved in the case as the injured party. In favor of Omega, Anton Astakhov must now pay 74.4 million rubles. If they are paid, it is possible that the bankruptcy of the company will resume. However, there are no writ of execution against Astakhov Jr. in the database of the bailiff service.
In December last year, the IFTS No. 4 for the city of Moscow demanded to recognize Omega as insolvent. How much debt the company has accumulated is unknown. For 2021, she paid 66.9 thousand rubles in taxes and had no problems. But in 2022, at the request of the Federal Tax Service, they began to suspend operations on accounts, and there were several dozen such decisions from November to May. The tax authorities failed to bankrupt Omega for the most banal reason – the debtor had neither money nor property to finance the bankruptcy procedure itself. But the implementation of the court decision can change everything.
The verdict against Astakhov Jr. is now available on the website of the Saratov Regional Court with only small denominations: the suspected accomplice Dmitry Aresiev, who was put on the wanted list, the victim Razgonyaev and witnesses appear there only under letter designations. But the names of the firms, where, according to the investigation, the Omega loan leaked, are given in full. The following companies are named: Gorizont RS LLC, NLMK Trading House LLC and Marseille LLC.
Finding out who it is is not easy. According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, a company called Horizon RS has existed in Moscow since 2018, belonged to a certain Alexander Isaev, was engaged in construction, and was liquidated as an inactive legal entity in March last year. There are several companies called Marseille, one of them, registered in Moscow, went bankrupt in 2020, the other, Saratov, was liquidated back in September 2019, shortly before Razgonyaev met Astakhov in Moscow and received an offer from him for help with a loan. According to the testimony of the victim, this happened in the summer of 2019.
There is only one “NLMK Trading House” in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities – a subsidiary of NLMK, and it is strange that a division of the metal industry giant could get involved in some dubious adventure with someone else’s loan. However, as Yevgeny Razgonyaev himself testified in court, the 10 million rubles transferred to the trading house from Omega’s accounts were almost immediately fully returned to the company.
So, what happened to Omega: the following picture emerged from the testimony of the victim – he met Astakhov at the Moscow Apabank, where he promised him help with a loan and obtaining orders for construction, provided that he would give half of the loan received to Astakhov and his business partner Dmitry Aresiev. Without these promises, the victim claimed, he would not have gone to Saratov, and he would not have turned to NVKbank.
Other similar testimonies also appear in the case file. A certain witness D. claimed that he also met Anton Astakhov through Aresiev and received the same lucrative offer: get a loan and give his patrons 50% of the amount plus an electronic key to the Client-Bank system, which allows you to remotely spend money from the account. Which company was made the same offer as “Omega” is not indicated in the verdict.
Omega’s financial data may indicate that the promise of help really worked – its revenue in 2020 amounted to 1.1 billion rubles, in 2019 it was even higher – 1.4 billion. However, the company’s turnover, according to open data, began to grow long before the fatal acquaintance, since 2014.
The whole question is – where did the 1.1 billion rubles go, so that after a short time the company had nothing to bankrupt? And will the DIA, as the bankruptcy trustee of the bankrupt NVKbank, look for these funds? Note that initially Anton Astakhov was charged with embezzlement of 1.2 billion rubles through loans taken for Omega, plus 130 million rubles of illegally obtained VAT. But only 75 million of the loan taken in Saratov reached the court.
As the court and the investigation found out, the IP address 217.28.213.106, from September 16 to November 25, 2019, used to remotely spend money from Omega accounts, belonged to Jacks LLC. This is another mystery company. There are several such companies in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, not all of them are active today. So through whom the money was scattered, only the investigator knows for sure.
It is noteworthy that the prosecution did not impute to Astakhov Jr. the use of family ties and extensive acquaintances among the management of banks in the commission of a crime. But the court did not exclude these circumstances.
