Reporting in with new developments in the "special-purpose Seychelles fishing trip" case.
This morning, Anti-Corruption Foundation director Roman Rubanov and Progress Party Central Council secretary Dmitry Krainev found themselves at the center of the world—in the Military Investigative Directorate of Russia’s Investigative Committee for the Balashikha garrison—where they had been urgently summoned for questioning over the publication about the "Shoigu plane case".
You might think there’s nothing finer than starting your morning under questioning in Balashikha. But that was only the beginning of this encounter with the sublime—the subsequent "interrogation" kept revealing ever new depths of... the sublime. For example, the investigator was unable to open the link to the original article on znak.com. Roman and Dmitry briefly feared that the official statement contained the wrong link, but mobile internet opened it without any problem. That is how something strange—and alarming—came to light: on the garrison’s internet, znak.com is blocked (and apparently not just that site). Presumably so that servicemen, heaven forbid, don’t read anything they shouldn’t.
As the questioning continued, the ACF staff effectively opened up a brave new world for the Balashikha garrison’s military investigator—the garrison to which the Russian Defense Ministry’s 223rd Flight Detachment is assigned. They showed him how entering an aircraft tail number lets you trace a plane’s route, and explained how to use that tail number to identify who it belongs to. These technological marvels caused the investigator genuine amazement. So did the comparison between plane-spotter websites and the official protocol websites of the Defense Ministry and the Foreign Ministry, from which one can draw the unmistakable conclusion that this aircraft was used by senior state officials.
Roman and Dmitry were already approaching the climax of the "ballad of the special flight," when, right in the middle of the story about the "model-looking girls," the investigator suddenly mentioned that he had studied the state contract for organizing flights (including ground handling) for the Defense Ministry’s 223rd Flight Detachment. That is when two fundamentally important things came to light.
First. It turned out that there is a matching contract with the same company for transportation services on that same aircraft for the same amount—in other words, the charterer pays only the cost of organizing the flight. Thus, the "buyer" is simply covering the 223rd Flight Detachment’s transportation expenses. No profit at all—just cost recovery. So it is unclear what "commercial benefit" the Defense Ministry was talking about back in May.
Second. As is well known, contracts involving state property must be published and then put out to open tender. But contracts for chartering these aircraft are not published anywhere, because they are processed not as leases of state property but as "service contracts." It is as if, instead of renting an apartment, you were offered a "service of living in an apartment." But of course that looks nothing like corruption. Not even close.
All in all, it was a productive morning in Balashikha: the ACF staff not only stunned the investigator with the sheer extent of what can be learned using nothing but open-source data, but also pointed out clear signs of corruption by officials of the Russian Defense Ministry’s 223rd Flight Detachment.
We will keep you informed about the progress of the investigation.