In RBC’s excellent investigation, “Who Profits from Paid Parking in Moscow,” there are three things that struck me personally:
1). The crooks around Liksutov used companies from a Cypriot holding group in their schemes—the same companies against which we succeeded in getting a criminal case opened back in 2008 over theft from Gazprom involving the supply of turbines for a power plant. Back then, about $10 million was stolen (which sounds almost funny by today’s standards).
And now in Moscow they are building “surface parking lots” and pocketing hundreds of millions.
2). The embezzlement scheme in the construction of these “surface parking lots” (a fancy name for an ordinary parking area) was organized by Liksutov in an incredibly crude and straightforward way: they simply allocate money to build something that already exists. There was a well-known post about this; RBC has now checked it again, and we at ACF (the Anti-Corruption Foundation) looked into it as well and found violations. Here is the text of our complaint.
Despite a whole string of scandals, publications, attacks, and denials, no one still knows where the money paid by people for parking goes, or in what amounts.
Incredible as it sounds, that is the case. It is hard to imagine that in any major European or American city, neither the media nor inquisitive activists would be unable for two whole years to obtain clear and transparent information about the flow of parking money.
Speaking for myself, after we began closely studying the “railcar procurement case,” I became fully convinced that Liksutov is not just a crook, but quite literally one of the biggest corrupt figures in the country. The scale is colossal. It is entirely possible that he is fronting for someone else, someone like Chemezov, but that does not change the substance of it.
The railcars, worth 133 billion rubles (about $1.4 billion), are in fact being purchased without a tender from Transmashholding, in which Liksutov is a shareholder. In other words, after we exposed this, the explanation became “I transferred the shares to my wife in the divorce”—but no one really doubts that the divorce was a sham.
His embezzlement schemes are fairly simple (basically forcing everything under TMH and securing it orders for the next 30 years), but the crook’s real talent and know-how, of course, lies in investing in public opinion. Here is a good graphic on that:
The red circle on the left is a “PR campaign for 411 million rubles” (about $4.4 million). For that kind of money, you can win over a lot of supporters—both outright paid fraudsters and ordinary people who, like gullible fools, are taken in by tales of a “European approach.”
After the forces of good prevail, all Muscovites will know where parking revenue goes, railcar procurement will take place through a fully transparent international tender, and all conflicts of interest involving “ex-wives” will be investigated.
Thanks to RBC for the report.