How much was measured
In the Ulyanovsk region, ten defendants in the bribery case were immediately detained, many of whom are members of the governor’s team Alexey Russian or his protégé in the municipalities. The situation has exacerbated the conflict between the current regional authorities and State Duma deputy Sergei Morozov, but there are too many traces in the case leading to the state corporation Rosatom.
Leninsky district court of Ulyanovsk arrested for two months – until October 7 – the former mayor of Dimitrovgrad Andrey Bolshakov. He is charged under Part 6 of Article 290 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (taking a bribe on an especially large scale). For ex-mayor threatens up to 15 years plus a fine.
Then the current head of the city was detained a day earlier in the courtyard of the municipal administration while receiving money. According to the plans, he was supposed to go from here to a meeting in the regional government with the participation of the governor of the Ulyanovsk region Alexey Russian.
He refused to surrender, voluntarily resisted, he was pulled out of the car by force, shooting into the air. During a search at Bolshakov’s, according to preliminary information, an amount exceeding a million rubles was found with him, which the security forces and consider bribe.
In the framework of the same case, other defendants were also detained, various sources give a number up to ten. The most senior among them are the former deputy governor and State Duma deputy, and now his adviser to the head of the region on a voluntary basis. Igor Edel and his assistant Dmitry Smirnov. Them incriminated the same article.
It is known that Edel will also remain in the pre-trial detention center until October 7, and that the rest of the defendants, in addition to part 6 of article 290 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation incriminate also Parts 4 and 5 of Article 291 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (giving a bribe by a group of persons by prior agreement, by an organized group or on a large scale).
Warning signs
Governor Aleksey Russkikh immediately reacted to the incident, promising not to wait for the investigation and trial, but to dismiss Bolshakov due to loss of confidence. And at the same time he reminded how many questions and claims to the mayor accumulated both from the regional authorities and from the residents.
And indeed, the City Council of Dimitrovgrad soon gathered for an extraordinary meeting and decided to terminate the powers of Andrei Bolshakov, appointing acting mayor of his first deputy Dmitry Tsivilev.
Almost simultaneously with the detention on the exclusion of Bolshakov from the party stated and United Russia, recalling at the same time how they “repeatedly fixed problems with management decisions in the city.”
The difficulties in the municipality, due to which the departure of Bolshakov became a “matter of time”, were announced by the senator from the Ulyanovsk region Airat Gibatdinov. True, for some reason he tied up corruption problems with the legacy of the former governor Sergei Morozov, who headed the region until April 2021, and now – a deputy of the State Duma. But Andrei Bolshakov was elected mayor of Dimitrovgrad quite recently – in January 2022, already under the new governor, and before that he held the position of deputy head of the city.
He was supported not only by United Russia, but also by Governor Alexei Russkikh, who is a member of the Communist Party. The support from the regional authorities was so serious that the Deputy Governor for Internal Policy Alexandru Korobko I had to hold conversations with the deputies, because many of them were originally customized against.
Bolshakov’s entire career before he took the mayor’s chair was, with short pauses, connected with the city administration. Here he managed to work as a legal management expert, deputy chairman of the committee for housing and communal services, deputy chairman of the property management committee. Moreover, according to observers, during all this time Andrei Bolshakov was not involved in scandals and conflicts, and in general had quite positive.
However, the clouds over the city hall of Dimitrovgrad began to thicken quite quickly. In April of this year, the first deputy mayor went on trial Rushan Sattarovwho previously headed the property management committee – the one where Bolshakov have worked deputy.
He was reminded of the events of 2021, when an official, when concluding contracts for the purchase of 11 apartments for the resettlement of citizens from emergency housing, overestimated their initial minimum cost from 42.3 thousand to 47 thousand per square meter. The damage was estimated at almost 2.5 million rubles. In June, the then-former vice-mayor received a surprisingly lenient sentence – a two-year ban on holding positions in the civil service, as well as an obligation reimburse damage. Did the ex-vice mayor trade his freedom for testimony against someone more senior?
Clear the construction site
Little is known about the essence of the criminal claims against Bolshakov, but it is clear that, as in the case of Sattarov, it is connected with the construction industry. Allegedly, the head of the city received a “kickback” from a certain construction organization during the construction of the facility, under construction within the framework of the federal national project.
Based on the post of Alexei Russkikh, it can be assumed that we are talking about the sphere of both housing and road construction. In particular, speaking about the funds allocated by the regional authorities for the needs of Dimitrovgrad, of which “some were spent inefficiently, some were simply plundered”, he mentions two projects: the creation of an academic campus on Kurchatov Street and the construction of the transport interchange Svirskaya – Jung of the Northern Fleet – Promyshlennaya.
In the first case, we are talking about the construction of 110 houses on 12 hectares by the end of 2023. Rosatom is also participating in this project, and about it this year to the Ulyanovsk region came even the deputy general director for science and strategy of this state corporation Yuri Olenin.
The traffic interchange project is aimed at resolving the problem of daily traffic jams on the border of the Western and Pervomaisky districts of the city during rush hour, and also implemented with the participation of Rosatom.
None of them managed to find tenders for the selection of contractors in the public procurement system.
High-ranking stakeholders
Some observers call the arrests of high-ranking officials in the Ulyanovsk region real purges, the initiative of which comes out from the federal center.
The arrest of the protégé of the current governor Aleksey Russkikh in the municipalities and just members of his team makes one think about the future of the head of the region himself, despite all his attempts to distance himself from the detainees as quickly as possible. Moreover, Rosatom is an organization that could lose money due to fraud in the region. Is it ready to use its influence to start forming its own regional elites? And will there now be a place for Alexei Russian not only in government offices, but simply at large?
