So, let’s talk about the new communications minister, Nikolai Anatolyevich Nikiforov, born in 1982.
Everyone praises him and says he’s 1) smart, 2) professional, and 3) not corrupt. Among those praising him are various acquaintances of mine whose judgment on this issue I trust quite a bit.
However, being a “good person” is neither a profession nor a qualification for a minister.
RosPil has long been fighting blatant fraud and theft in government IT procurement, and we would very much like the wonderful new minister to help us with this. He has the authority to do so. And presumably the will as well—after all, he’s an honest minister.
Our request is entirely specific: we need help with one of RosPil’s cases.
So, there is a crook by the name of Vladimir Miklushevsky; he is now the governor of Primorye (Russia’s Primorsky Krai in the Far East), and before that he was rector of Far Eastern University.
After becoming governor, incidentally, he immediately became famous for ordering 90 million rubles’ worth of renovations to his residence—about $3 million at the time—even though it didn’t need repairs (apparently a hammam was very important to this statesman), but that’s just a side note.
So, during his time as rector, in the summer of 2011, Miklushevsky announced a tender to create an “Electronic University” system worth a staggering 820 million rubles. You’d think that with a $27 million prize on the table, numerous IT companies would have rushed in and started competing fiercely with one another. Nothing of the sort. When the envelopes were opened, it turned out that only one company had submitted a bid—LLC “Vintegra Projects”—and it was awarded a contract for 647 million rubles.
How did that happen? There are plenty of companies that provide this kind of service. To put it plainly, an “Electronic University” system is not just ten computers in an office—but neither is it a synchrophasotron (a massive Soviet particle accelerator). Hundreds of similar projects are implemented around the world.
Very simply: in the tender documentation, the crooks at Far Eastern University led by Miklushevsky specified that “the contractor had to have prior experience performing work for federal universities.” Why? Russia has only 10 federal universities, and there is no evidence that any of them had an outstanding “Electronic University” system.
The explanation is the usual one: we showed the tender documentation to many experts, and they all unanimously said the price was inflated several times over.
Some details of the deal look especially interesting: Since 2007, Miklushevsky had worked in the Ministry of Education side by side with one Isaak Iosifovich Kalina (now head of Moscow’s Department of Education). From 2008 to 2010, Kalina and Miklushevsky were both deputy education ministers.
And, what a coincidence, Isaak Kalina’s son, Roman Kalina, represented the interests of the “winner” under a power of attorney:
Maybe it’s a coincidence, or maybe it’s worth taking a closer look at this remarkable working dynasty of Kalinas, who win tenders precisely where they have administrative leverage.
RosPil challenged the tender results. The process took several months, but on February 29, 2012, the Primorye office of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) ruled in our favor and said the contract should be declared invalid.
The experts brought in by the FAS also confirmed that this work was far from unique:
True, after Miklushevsky became governor, Far Eastern University suddenly started having a remarkable run of luck in court, and the Primorye arbitration court overturned the FAS decision, but we hope that ruling will be successfully appealed.
Back to our good Nikiforov. His ministry has the authority to review contracts like this and how they are carried out. We saw this in the scandal involving the “Tak Zdorovo” (“So Healthy”) website:
In other words, roughly speaking, Minister Nikiforov should be exactly the kind of authority we all want to see taking on the crooks laundering money through government IT procurement.
Therefore, the RosPil project strongly urges the new minister of information technology and communications, Nikolai Nikiforov, to determine: - how justified the contract price was; - how well the “Electronic University” system implemented at FEFU (Far Eastern Federal University)—which should already be operational—matches the amount spent on it from the federal budget (647 million rubles)
And then to forward the materials to law enforcement once the Communications Ministry’s jurisdiction has been exhausted.
That would be the right thing to do and might even mark the beginning of bringing some order to government IT procurement—this absolute hell and trash of websites costing tens of millions and electronic systems costing billions.
Here is our official letter; we sent it a week ago.
We’re waiting for a response.