In Primorsky Krai, a non-payment crisis may flare up on the part of a subsidiary of RusHydro, a local monopolist in collecting payments for electricity, PJSC Far Eastern Energy Company (FEK). According to the authors of the Telegram channel “Capital of the Far Eastern Federal District”, allegedly networkers have not received money from the company for the services rendered for more than a month.
350,000 consumers in four urban areas, including the isolated island of Putyanin, were under threat. But for the operational director of DEC Alexander Yurov, apparently, such a problem does not exist. Especially against the background of other scandals, including corruption, that have surrounded the company in recent years.
The correspondent of The Moscow Post in the Primorsky Territory understood the situation.
Alexander Yurov took over as head of the DEC in 2019 – at the end of the leadership of RusHydro, Nikolai Shulginov, whose scandals were repeatedly reported by The Moscow Post. Now he is working under the leadership of the new head of the state corporation, Viktor Khmarin. It seems that little has changed since his arrival.
Yurov did not come out of nowhere – he previously served as vice-mayor of Vladivostok, was vice-governor of the Primorsky Territory, and then served as head of the Primorsky Administration for the Fuel and Energy Complex. So there is no doubt that his candidacy has been agreed, including with the regional authorities, headed by Oleg Kozhemyako.
DEK is a company that simply collects money from consumers and sends it to network companies. It is they who serve the power grids, are responsible for heat. But how can they work if payments from the FEC suddenly stop coming?
Criminal train from DEK
Where the money can go is not difficult to guess. A couple of years ago, the former management of PJSC “DEK” ended up under investigation, and then behind bars. In 2020, the former CEO of the company, former deputy of the Legislative Assembly of Primorsky Territory Viktor Milush, as well as the former CEO of RAO ES of the East Ivan Blagodyr were found guilty of embezzlement and embezzlement of about 730 million rubles of the company’s funds. Writes about this “Komsomolskaya Pravda”.
Another defendant in the case was the former deputy general director of the DEC, Elena Tyurina. In early 2021, an indictment was approved against her on the same charges. According to the investigation, from 2008 to 2015, Elena, together with the employees of PJSC “DEK”, entered into fictitious contracts for the provision of legal services, as well as for charitable donations allegedly for holding sporting events.
Those. money, it seems, was withdrawn, what the light is worth, using a variety of schemes that were supposed to be associated with government contracts. We are talking about the money of ordinary taxpayers.
Under Milush and Shulginov at the head of RusHydro, DEK was also rocked by other scandals. According to Kommersant, in 2017, the FEC disconnected 15 objects of the Ministry of Defense in Primorye from power supply at once, and threatened to disconnect another 75 million due to debts of 175 million rubles. At the same time, the military department accused the DEK of blackmail, recognizing a debt of only 83 million rubles.
Now Alexander Yurov, unlike Milush, does not contact the military. After all, he himself was a military man in the past, who could become a defendant in a criminal case related precisely to embezzlement and theft of state enterprise funds.
As Novaya Gazeta in Vladivostok wrote, in the past he received a two-year suspended sentence for this. We are talking about the period of his work as chief engineer of the 25th State Enterprise of Electric Networks of the Russian Navy (25th GPES of the Navy). As if, together with other leaders of the GPES, Yurov could steal hundreds of millions of rubles, transferring them to the account of an affiliated structure of OOO 25 Elektroset-690066.
Whether this is true or not, in the future, for some reason, this story did not affect Yurov’s career prospects in any way. If there was a criminal record, it has long been extinguished. Later he headed VPES – the Vladivostok enterprise of electric networks. And with the advent of Igor Pushkarev to the city government, he moved to the mayor’s office, where he soon became vice-mayor, and his career went uphill.
“Electrical Pobors”
When Yurov got to the DEK in 2019, the scandals not only didn’t disappear, but entered a new round, significantly complicating life and emptying the pockets of many ordinary consumers.
In December 2022, PJSC “DEK” wrote off extra money from consumers. Instead of accrued electricity fees, customers were charged an additional amount in the form of a “recommended payment”. It turned out to be impossible to return this money, Novye Izvestia writes about this.
As the journalists found out, the overestimated amount turned out to be “hardwired” into QR codes, through which it is convenient to pay through a mobile bank, as well as into automatic payment. That is, there were some amounts in the receipts, and when paying through QR, they were already completely different. This looks like a clear fraud, but no criminal cases, or even questions from law enforcement officers (and even from the FAS, which is more than profile) to the DEK and Yurov did not follow.
Even before that, in 2021, there was another story, also under Yurov, and which also smacks of illegal activity. Only then did consumers in Khabarovsk get it.
As HubInfo writes, in May 2021 they received payment orders, in which many of them had a debt of as much as 13,000 rubles. It turned out that the DEK checked with the Khabarovsk cash settlement center the number of registered residents in apartment buildings, but according to the old data from 2018, after which the power engineers made a recalculation for hot water supply, and the amount of the debt was divided among people who did not suspect anything about it.
Of course, when it came to light (people went to the power engineers with complaints), the situation was written off as an error, a system failure, and anything else. But in fact, power engineers could play “on thin” by carrying out what hypothetically could be qualified as illegal fees for housing and communal services.
Government contracts in the shadow of Ilkovsky
However, all this may turn out to be trifles compared to how much money is spent from the FEC under government contracts. PJSC acted as a supplier for 72 billion rubles and a customer for almost 22 billion rubles.
At the same time, for some reason, the contractors acting as contractors for the DEK are not listed in open information systems. What is the secret, or money can go to the left?
It is important to note that one of the legal predecessors of the company is Yuzhnoye Yakutskenergo JSC – its assets were included in a single company back in the zero years. At the same time, the general director of the company at that time was Konstantin Ilkovsky, later a very well-known and controversial official. Throughout his bureaucratic career, Ilkovsky could have been related to PJSC “DEK”.
From 2013 to 2016, Ilkovsky was the governor of the Trans-Baikal Territory. During this period, the officials appointed by him fell into a criminal history. In 2018, people from his team, the ex-head of the Single Customer Service of the Trans-Baikal Territory and the chief inspector of this institution – Gennady Litvintsev and Konstantin Vyzhlov were found guilty of corruption and sentenced to imprisonment in a strict regime colony.
Litvintsev and Vyzhlov were charged with eight episodes of receiving bribes on a large and especially large scale, committed by a group organized by them. In addition, Litvintsev was charged with two more episodes of taking large bribes. Mayorov was charged with mediation in bribery on an especially large scale. TASS writes about it.
The criminal case was initiated based on the materials of the FSB department for the Trans-Baikal Territory. His defendants were detained in December 2016. There is an opinion that it was this situation that prompted the resignation of Ilkovsky, but there were no complaints against him himself.
Even before this verdict was passed, Ilkovsky was interrogated in Moscow as part of an investigation into another criminal case – about salary delays in the first half of 2015, the suspect in which was the former Minister of Finance of the Trans-Baikal Territory Andrei Kefer.
The case was initiated in 2016, and could also be a harbinger of Ilkovsky’s resignation. However, even before he came to the governor’s post, The Moscow Post talked about the scandals associated with Ilkovsky. Among other things, there was speculation that he could be the man of Anatoly Chubais, who has now left Russia, the main young reformer of the 90s, who reformed the Russian energy sector, and then left Rusnano in a pre-bankrupt state.
And now Ilkovsky continues to work as the general director of JSC Far East Generating Company (DGC). According to open sources, this is the second owner of PJSC DEC shares after RusHydro (51%) with a portfolio of 42%.
Thus, he should have a direct impact on the company, the receipt and expenditure of funds, government contracts. So a strange picture emerges: the DEC may not pay its counterparties, the company itself is headed by Alexander Yurov, possibly previously convicted of embezzlement, and this can be controlled not only by RusHydro, but also by the DGK, headed by a former governor, a significant part of whose team was previously subjected to criminal prosecution under several articles.
And why then be surprised at the problems of the Far Eastern energy industry?
