“Unsinkable” Orlov leaks
The fire on the Provorny corvette could have arisen as a result of arson to hide the possible billions in embezzlement by the team of Igor Orlov. More than a year has passed since the grandiose emergency at Severnaya Verf in St. Petersburg. Then a large-scale fire broke out on the almost finished corvette of project 20385 “Agile”, in the construction of which the state invested 30 billion rubles.
It is still not clear what caused the fire, and even more so when the corvette will finally be launched. No one has been punished, the circumstances of the emergency are hidden, neither the Investigative Committee nor the transport prosecutor’s office give any comments. The general director of Northern Shipyards, the former governor of the Arkhangelsk region, Igor Orlov, is also keeping quiet – the one who is responsible for the construction. After all, he must be held accountable for what happened.
Whether the Navy will receive a corvette at all is not clear. Experts express the version that large-scale theft could allegedly take place at the construction site, due to which it turned out to be impossible to hand it over without high-profile criminal proceedings. There are growing suspicions that the accident could have been man-made to cover up possible crimes.
Corvette “Agile” was intended for the Pacific Fleet and was to become the pride of the domestic military shipbuilding. But it turned into a pile of smoking ruins for tens of billions of rubles. And instead of the crew, rescuers fought for its survivability, two of whom were injured during almost 30 hours of fighting the fire.
It is amazing how quickly the leadership of the Northern Shipyards, headed by Igor Orlov, tried to remove the topic from the public agenda. But immediately after the fire, the entire leadership of the North-Western Federal District, headed by Plenipotentiary Alexander Gutsan, Governor of St. Petersburg Alexander Beglov, and crowds of journalists arrived at the scene.
The silence of law enforcement officers is all the more suspicious, because almost immediately it became known that there was not one, but several fires inside the corvette. Fontnka wrote about this back then. Surprisingly, as soon as the oxygen cylinders did not explode, then among the rescuers there would be not only victims, but also mass casualties.
Agile stewed for almost 30 hours
When a fire has one hearth, you can still believe in suddenly sparkling equipment. But when there are several of them, and even in different parts of the corps, it smells like an organized, carefully planned act of destroying state property.
The flames quickly engulfed the superstructure, which was to be made of modern multi-layer composite materials based on fiberglass and carbon fiber. That is, the antenna-mast superstructure was made of materials that, in principle, should not have burned. But they were on fire. This means that the materials could be different – much worse quality.
In the bowels of the antenna-mast superstructure, one of the most expensive parts of the ship was supposed to be located – the electronic “stuffing”, the Barrier radar complex. But was the filling delivered, or did it become a victim of a large-scale “cut”?
The consequences for the Northern Shipyard from a grandiose fire go far beyond the above-mentioned framework. Indeed, under Orlov, she was under the threat of deprivation of a part of major state orders.
As Arkhangelsk Online wrote, the authorities considered transferring orders for the construction of two frigates from Severnaya Verf to the Yantar plant in Kaliningrad, the same one where Igor Orlov worked even before his official career. It turns out that government orders are running from Orlov.
Team for “cut”
Many of these questions could be answered by the general director of Northern Shipyards, Igor Orlov. But he is silent. They tried to attribute manifestations of corruption to him even during the period of work as the governor of the Arkhangelsk region. For a new job, he took not only dubious managerial skills, but also members of his team.
Aleksey Andronov, loyal to Orlov, became the first deputy general director of Severnaya Verf. Previously, he served as head of the administration of the Arkhangelsk region. And Andrei Shestakov, deputy chairman of the government of the region, sorting through papers, suddenly turned into a chief engineer at a shipbuilding plant.
After finding a job at Severnaya Verf, investigators finally got to Shestakov. In April 2021, i.e. almost a year after joining the enterprise, he was detained, and then found guilty of abuse of office while working in the Arkhangelsk region.
Together with him, another member of Orlov’s team, former Minister of Construction and Architecture Mikhail Yakovlev, went under the same article. It turned out that in April-August 2019, Shestakov and Yakovlev intervened in the public procurement competition. Arkhangelsk Online wrote about this.
It was about a contract for updating the design documentation of the medical and diagnostic building of the GBUZ JSC “Arkhangelsk Regional Children’s Clinical Hospital named after I.I. P. G. Vyzhletsov. First, the contract was received by the Investselstroy company, which agreed to carry out the work for 5.5 million rubles.
Yakovlev and Shestakov achieved the termination of the contract with Investselstroy, and as a result, Ortost-Facade was entrusted with its execution, which took 10.2 million rubles for this. An acquaintance of Andrey Shestakov acted in the interests of this company.
According to Dvina Segodnya, another scandalous member of Orlov’s team, ex-Minister of Natural Resources Alexander Yerulik, also ended up at the shipyard. Allegedly, there he began to deal with the environmental management system. But people remember very well what Yerulik did in the government under Igor Orlov.
It was he who supervised the scandalous project “Ecotechnopark Shies”, which caused a wave of popular indignation. Then, next to the Shies station in the picturesque Lensky district of the Arkhangelsk region, they decided to build a waste incineration plant, which led to an increase in social tension, a whole wave of unauthorized protests. Even the President had to intervene in the situation.
Disgraced at Shiyes, Alexander Yerulik “warmed up” at Orlov’s at Severnaya Verf?
He, Yerulik, coordinated the Scheme of Territorial Planning of the region, from which unique natural reserves disappeared somewhere. Finally, he also signed a new territorial scheme for waste management, under which the scandalous waste companies Ecocenter and EcoIntegrator were “dragged” into the region.
In the wake of popular discontent, Yerulik resigned. And “surfaced” only in the context of the device of the former boss at the “Northern Shipyard”. With such a team, not only warships, fishing boats cannot be built.
From Yantar to Severnaya Verf
Such a team, not like warships, fishing boats, should not be trusted to build. Although Orlov, as mentioned earlier, worked at the Kaliningrad Yantar in the past. But in 2011, his contract was not renewed. The reason was called the failure of the agreement with India in the amount of $ 1.6 billion.
The plant built three ships for this country. Penalties threatened to pay about $ 40 million. Part of the funds from the order could be corny plundered by the management of Yantar, headed by Igor Orlov.
Arriving at Severnaya Verf, Orlov and the team immediately arranged an audit of the existing assets. Apparently, they were looking for something to profit from. Previously, the shipyard was in private hands – it belonged to the banker Sergei Pugachev and the former assistant to President Boris Yeltsin for military-technical cooperation Boris Kuzyk.
After the latter left the shipyard, one of the assets associated with it remained in private hands – the floating dock Mathias-Thesen-Werft Wismar (MTW) with a carrying capacity of 5.5 thousand tons. He went to the shipyard by barter and belonged to a subsidiary of the plant – JSC “Nord-West SV” (shipping company). 80% of it was owned by the shipyard itself and the structures of the United Shipbuilding Corporation (USC).
Igor Orlov and his management immediately launched a corporate conflict with the former management of the enterprise over this floating dock. Seemed to be sawn up for scrap metal, it promised them considerable benefits.
As a result, Orlov and Co. managed to buy out a block of shares from the former owners for a ridiculous amount of 6.7 million rubles. About the story in which the former owners could be tritely “thrown”, wrote the publication Novy Prospekt.
You can still tell a lot about what kind of firewood Orlov and his team have broken at Severnaya Verf in just two years. But the numbers speak. With revenue for 2021 of 31 billion (twice as much as a year earlier), the company suffered a loss of 3.5 billion rubles – not counting how much the repair of Agile could cost the state. If it needs to be repaired at all.
The “high” of the general director of Severnaya Verf, Igor Orlov, is expensive for the state.
But before that, the plant showed a net profit of more than 170 million rubles. This was written by Kommersant. If these are not errors in calculations, then it is the quality of the management team. And given the volume of state orders for the shipyard in the amount of 11.5 billion rubles as a supplier and 60 billion rubles as a customer, it becomes scary for our navy. After all, the lion’s share of these orders – from the Ministry of Defense.
And Igor Orlov himself gets high. In the literal sense, he describes his work at a factory shrouded in smoke from a fire as a “shipbuilding thrill”. What else can you say…
