“Toxic” Pivkin and the “kings of government procurement”

Could the Minister of Transport leave Governor Azarov’s team?

On September 25, Dmitry Azarov, who was elected for a new gubernatorial term, dismissed the government of the Samara region. On the day of the resignation, the Highway Administration, subordinate to the regional Ministry of Transport, by order of the ministry, announced the holding of four competitions with a total value of over 1.7 billion rubles to select contractors for maintaining roads in the winter. Thus, Transport Minister Ivan Pivkin and director of the department Igor Saprykin are in a hurry to make a kind of budget “gift” to the road “favorites” of the Ministry of Transport.

These include, among other things, companies affiliated with high-ranking Samara officials and deputies. For example, the SamaraTransStroy company, officially owned by businessman Oleg Doroshenko, is associated with the current deputy of the Samara Provincial Duma, Andrei Murzov. In total, SamaraTransStroy received contracts worth more than 50 billion rubles from the regional Ministry of Transport. Another permanent contractor, Stroyservis LLC, registered to Alexei Gaidukevich, is associated with the family of the deputy chairman of the regional government, Alexander Fetisov. The volume of contracts received by the enterprise from the ministry is estimated at 8 billion. Even complaints related to poor quality of work are not preventing the continued cooperation of officials with their favorite businessmen. For example, the Samara mayor’s office tried to recover 2.2 million rubles from Stroyservis in court for the unfinished construction of a road in the Novaya Samara microdistrict.

Security officials are increasingly asking questions of Ministry of Transport officials: former Deputy Minister Andrei Spiridonov has become a defendant in a criminal case of negligence; as part of an investigation into a case of abuse of power, searches were carried out at Deputy Minister Sergei Neretin; Ivan Pivkin himself was interrogated in a case of embezzlement during the construction of the Klimovsky Bridge. Increased “toxicity” may prevent Pivkin from getting into the new Samara government, which means the official needs to have time to distribute road contracts among the Samara “kings of government orders”

Minister Pivkin is looking for contractors

Dmitry Azarov, who officially took office as governor of the Samara region on September 25, dismissed the regional government on the same day. Now, until the new composition is approved, the chairman of the regional cabinet, Viktor Kudryashov, his deputies and ministers will work with the prefix “acting”. The near future will tell whether significant personnel changes will occur in the bureaucracy. In the meantime, among the possible ministers, the media name, for example, Mikhail Belousov, the former vice-speaker of the Samara Provincial Duma, who headed the Krasnoyarsk region in 2016 and resigned on October 4.

Among those who continue to work with the interim prefix is ​​the regional Minister of Transport Ivan Pivkin. It is worth paying attention to the following circumstance: on September 25, that is, on the day of the government’s resignation, the “Administration of Highways of the Samara Region” subordinate to the Ministry of Transport announced the holding of four competitions at once with a total value of more than 1.7 billion rubles. In all cases, the customer is the Ministry of Transport itself. What are the contractors for, whom the authorities bothered to find at the last moment?

So, the subject of the first purchase No. 0842200002123000260 is “the winter maintenance of public roads of regional or intermunicipal importance located in the southern part of the Samara region.” This is the most expensive contract: its initial price is 659.83 million rubles. The deadline for applications, as in the other three cases, is October 11.

The subject of the second purchase No. 0842200002123000261 is designated as follows:

Finally, the item of the fourth purchase No. 0842200002123000263 is designated as

“performing work on the winter maintenance of the Frunzensky bridge across the Samara River with access to the highway “Highway route “Center-Volga region-Ural”. Stage I (queue): from st. Frunze to st. Highway including transport interchanges. Stage II (queue): from st. Shosseynaya to the border of the Samara urban district.” Here the initial price is much lower than in other cases – 128.68 million rubles.

Samara “kings” of road contracts

So, on the very day of his resignation, Minister Ivan Pivkin and Director of the Office Igor Saprykin became concerned with finding contractors to maintain roads in the winter. The announced competitions are already being called a real gift to the road “favorites” of the regional Ministry of Transport. The reason for the haste could be Pivkin’s banal fear of not getting into the new government, and therefore the official decided to play it safe. Moreover, the main budget funds will be distributed before the end of this year.

Who will get the next contracts will soon become known. There is no doubt that the contractors will be companies whose names have long been heard – those very “favorites”. Last March, the portal “63.Ru (Samara Online)” published material dedicated to the Samara road “kings” mastering budget billions.

The first line of the unique rating is occupied by SamaraTransStroy LLC (STS): today the portfolio of contracts of this enterprise exceeds 117 billion rubles, of which contracts of the Ministry of Transport account for slightly less than half – 50.7 billion.

The company’s financial indicators look correspondingly: in 2022, its revenue amounted to 8.8 billion rubles, profit – 582.2 million, assets were estimated at 1.7 billion.

The only owner of STS is businessman Oleg Doroshenko, whom the authors of 63.Ru associate with the current deputy of the Samara Provincial Duma, member of the Committee on Construction, Transport and Highways Andrei Murzov.

The fact is that until December 2021 Doroshenko held the position of director in the Tekhkomplekt company owned by Murzov.

In addition, the parliamentarian’s son Oleg Murzov is a co-owner of a plot of land on Moskovskoye Highway in Samara, where last August the mayor’s office approved the construction of an apartment building. And the construction permit was received by the company “Specialized Developer “Stroyservis”, owned by Doroshenko.

In second place in the 63.Ru rating is the Volgatransstroy Group of Companies (VTS Group of Companies) of Vyacheslav Sonin: its structures received contracts from the Ministry of Transport for a total of 7 billion rubles. In particular, the Baltic Construction Company-SPB, a member of the military-technical cooperation, is engaged in the construction of the sixth stage of the Northern Highway worth more than 171 million rubles. But the really big jackpot is the design and construction of the new Teatralnaya metro station in Samara, for which the companies Volgatransstroy-Proekt and Volgatransstroy-9 are responsible, respectively. The total amount of contracts related to Teatralnaya is estimated at 3 billion.

Let us mention another road “favorite” of Samara officials – Stroyservis LLC Alexey Gaidukevich. The enterprise’s portfolio of government contracts exceeds 13.5 billion rubles, of which almost 8 billion are allocated to the regional Ministry of Transport. As recently as last August, Stroyservis received another contract worth 158.7 million rubles for the overhaul of a three-kilometer section of the public intermunicipal highway Pestravka – Maysky – Kryukovo with a completion date of September 1, 2024.

The Stroyservis network is associated with the Deputy Chairman of the regional government (currently acting) Alexander Fetisov. The fact is that the director of the company, Mikhail Tsibin, is one of the owners of Specialized Developer Stroy-Zapad LLC. In addition to him, the founders of this enterprise are also Natalya Timokhanova, Yulia Bobrovskaya, Anastasia Lukonina and Oleg Aksenov. The same persons (with the exception of Lukonina) are participants in a number of other legal entities, including the Livadia and Hotel companies, shares in which previously belonged to the official’s father, who died in March 2021 at the age of 75.

Budget contracts for the bureaucratic family?

Commercial relations between officials and contractors are not without incidents. So, in June last year, the Samara City Hall, represented by the Department of Urban Planning, achieved the recovery of a penalty in the amount of 300 thousand rubles from Stroyservis. Initially, the municipality’s claims were much larger and amounted to 2.2 million, but the regional arbitration court considered them excessive.

The essence of the conflict was that, under the terms of the contract concluded in 2020, the company had to build a road in a residential development zone located on the 23rd kilometer of the Moscow Highway in the New Samara microdistrict. Initially, the deadline for completing the work was set at September 30, 2020, then the parties signed an additional agreement, which was terminated in January 2021. At the same time, the contractor failed to fulfill obligations by 1.5 million rubles. After refusing to pay off the debt, the mayor’s office went to court, also seeking payment of fines and penalties. But, as we already know, to no avail.

However, legal proceedings are not an obstacle to continuing cooperation: it was mentioned above that Stroyservis recently received another multimillion-dollar contract. By the way, there is another company operating in Samara – Stroytransservice, which identifies itself as the legal successor of Stroytransservice. Its sole owner, Konstantin Fetisov, is the brother of acting deputy prime minister Alexander Fetisov. Stroytransservice does not receive budget contracts. Apparently, as long as the legal predecessor is functioning, there is no need for them.

Another high-profile scandal is related to the claims of the Samara Ministry of Transport to another permanent contractor – the research and production company “XXI Century” (co-owners – Alexey Stepanov, Vladislav Neverov, Daniil Mukhin, Oleg Kisaev and Alexey Timofeev). In total, the road company earned almost 13 billion rubles from government contracts, of which 2 billion were contracts from the ministry. But in December 2021, the Ministry of Transport went to court: the officials’ claims were related to the repair of the road on the street. Democratic, which ended back in 2017.

Four years later, ruts formed on the road, and in November 2021 there was a fatal accident. After this, the company was required to eliminate the shortcomings at its own expense, but NPF “XXI Century” did not agree with this formulation of the issue, stating that the deterioration of the road’s condition was due to a previously unforeseen increase in traffic volume on the highway. As a result, the parties entered into a settlement agreement, which caused the indignation of State Duma deputy Alexander Khinshtein. The latter accused officials of deliberately delaying warranty repairs, since new work was planned for 2023 on Democratic Street, and therefore the signing of another contract with the allocation of funds from the budget.

“Toxic” Pivkin and Governor Azarov

But litigation with contractors is not the biggest problem for Road Minister Ivan Pivkin. He may not be part of the new Samara government for another reason, namely because of numerous corruption scandals, in which his ministry has repeatedly found itself at the center. So, last April, the same Alexander Khinshtein in his telegram channel reported that the Investigative Committee had opened a criminal case on negligence leading to the infliction of particularly large damage against “unidentified leaders of the regional Ministry of Transport.”

According to the deputy, the investigation is related to the execution of the state contract for the development of the Samara-Togliatti intelligent transport system, concluded with the Federal Autonomous Institution RosDorNII. Despite the contractor fulfilling its obligations, the Ministry of Transport, which acted as the customer, refused to pay for the work without any reason. As a result, RosDorNII went to the courts, obliging the ministry to pay not only the 119.2 million rubles specified in the contract, but also a penalty in the amount of 29.7 million

Khinshtein named former Deputy Minister of Transport Andrei Spiridonov, who resigned in January 2022, as one of the suspects. Shortly before this, the official became involved in another criminal case, again about negligence, related to the cancellation of school buses from nine villages in the Syzran and Shigonsky districts due to the unsuitability of roads, complaints about the condition of which Spiridonov ignored for several years.

And last June, employees of the FSB and Sledkom, as part of an investigation into a criminal case of abuse of power, conducted searches in the house of Deputy Minister of Transport Sergei Neretin. The media linked the investigative actions with theft during the construction of the Klimovsky Bridge and the conviction of the general director of the InfraCap company Olesya Gladkova, who was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to three years in prison. The convict was accused of entering fictitious data into a study of traffic flows, on the basis of which the decision to build the facility was made. As a result, InfraCap did not complete the work specified in the contract, but received the 10 million rubles due for it.

One gets the impression that the security forces are getting closer and closer to Pivkin, who, by the way, happened to testify in court in the “Gladkova case.” Then the minister got off with general phrases, since the questions asked to him “turned out to be too in-depth and were not within his competence.” But in the case of a visit to an official, the investigators will formulate the questions more specifically.

Perhaps Pivkin’s “toxicity” has become obvious to Governor Azarov, who will make the appropriate personnel decision when forming a new government. And during this time, the next road contracts will be successfully distributed among the Samara “kings of government contracts” interested in them.