While I’m sitting in court over the “Yves Rocher” case, let me tell you about a website that Moscow City Hall had built for 226 million rubles.
Andrei Mishchenkov from RosPil wrote about this once, and there were lots of comments along the lines of, “You’re lying about everything, and prudent Sergei Semyonovich would never have allowed such a thing.”
But then a very interesting interview with the head of the Moscow government’s Department of Information Technology came out, and he was asked directly about it:
If you look at the original post, you can see that: a) we didn’t get anything mixed up; b) 226 million rubles really was spent on this website.
We’re glad that official Yermolayev isn’t trying to dispute that figure, but the rest of his excuses are astonishing: “We kept reworking the concept, so each time we had to pay a lot.”
I don’t know what “concepts” they were supposedly reworking, but in the end this is still what we got right here:
and they paid 226 million rubles for it. I’m not an expert, but I don’t think you’ll find a single specialist who would seriously claim that a website like this could cost $8 million.
By the way, we didn’t find any “concept changes” in the technical specifications, which is exactly what we wrote in our complaint.
If someone threw away 70 million rubles on a website and then had to “do a complete 180,” then serious questions need to be asked about the competence and professional fitness of City Hall staff—both from the Luzhkov era (under former Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov) and under Sobyanin, because most of the money (146 million rubles) was spent by Yermolayev’s department under Mayor Sobyanin.
A review of the government procurement website shows that the average cost of an investment portal commissioned by a federal subject (a Russian regional government) is 1.7 million rubles. In other words, 130 times less.
So I have two questions for readers—one practical, the other metaphysical:
How much do you think Moscow government officials got in kickbacks for handing contractors 226 million rubles to create this website?
Why is it me sitting here as the defendant in the Zamoskvoretsky Court, and not Yermolayev and Sobyanin?
P.S. I recommend reading the interview in full—there’s a lot of interesting material there. For example, it says that when you book an appointment at a public clinic through the electronic registration system, your email address ends up with Sobyanin’s PR people, who then send you messages about what a wonderful and honest mayor he is.