(Well, almost)
This morning, it almost seemed as if the head of the Russian Presidential Administration had gone to work for the Anti-Corruption Foundation:
Very, very good. We welcome statements like this, and since Ivanov specifically highlighted the “awarding of state contracts to relatives,” we demand that these words immediately be turned into action and that attention be focused on one of Russia’s biggest corrupt officials.
Yes, yes — you’ll now see for yourselves that my statements along the lines of “Liksutov is one of Russia’s biggest corrupt officials” are not rhetorical exaggeration.
Take a look: RBC compiled a ranking of the largest state procurement contracts in 2014.
Moscow’s metro car order worth 144 billion rubles, a textbook example of conflict of interest and corruption, ranks second largest. In third place, already far smaller, are nuclear icebreakers worth 84 billion rubles.
In fact, RBC is not being precise enough. The Moscow Metro should be in first place. More precisely, in first place by an enormous margin over the runner-up.
In 2014, the Moscow Metro held two very similar tenders — one for 144 billion rubles (832 cars) in February, and another for 133 billion rubles (768 cars) in October. That makes a total of 277 billion rubles, nearly double the amount of the contract in second place.
Both contracts were awarded without any competition to entities within Transmashholding, which until recently was headed by Transport Department chief Maksim Liksutov.
This is an excellent example of the real scale of these people’s theft — they siphon off tens of billions.
Let me remind you: Sobyanin and Liksutov publicly swore up and down a hundred times that there would be a competitive international tender — after all, this concerns the future of the Moscow Metro for the next 30 years — and yet the money was still steered, without any competition whatsoever, to Transmashholding, where the family of Liksutov, who organized this scheme, holds shares.
I won’t be too lazy to write once again about the most important point:
Here are links to everything and a list of questions that Liksutov has still been unable to answer.
Even if we were to believe for a minute that Liksutov’s divorce was real rather than fictitious, one hard fact would still remain: the shareholders of Transmashholding still include his ex-wife and children.
Children, thank God, do not become “former” children, so from a legal standpoint we have a deputy mayor of Moscow awarding multi-billion-ruble no-bid contracts to a company whose shareholders are his close relatives.
For those who understand anything about transport, I would like to point out that these railcar contracts are being signed 30 years into the future. Everyone reading this post will have grandchildren by then, and Moscow will still be paying under the contract to Liksutov’s children, ensuring them a wonderful life abroad.
As a former member of the board of directors of Aeroflot, I can tell you that aircraft are not purchased 30 years in advance. The state does not procure submarines or nuclear icebreakers with that kind of planning horizon. But here we are talking about railcars.
We will once again appeal to S. Ivanov, demanding an investigation into Liksutov’s activities for corruption and conflict of interest, and I urge all of you to remember this whole crooked scheme so that the chorus of “Liksutov fans,” working off the billions allocated for “Department of Transport PR”, does not fool you.
Liksutov is a crook and one of the biggest corrupt officials around. Everyone who praises him while “failing to notice” the railcar procurement story is the same kind of crook.