You probably thought we'd abandoned our old favorite, Yakunin, after he was kicked out of Russian Railways?
Of course not. That's simply not how we operate, and we certainly do not intend to stop demanding that Vladimir Ivanovich be held criminally liable, along with all his fur-coat storage facilities, gatekeepers' houses, blocked-off rivers, and offshore empires.
The inevitability of punishment is a legal principle we are very fond of.
After Yakunin's resignation, we reviewed all the corruption allegations the ACF (Anti-Corruption Foundation) had made against him, consolidated them, and submitted more than 80 complaints. Not only to law enforcement agencies, but also to the board of directors of Russian Railways, to its management board members, and even to State Duma deputies, who shout the loudest about corruption but, in our view, do far too little.
Under its new leadership, Russian Railways should begin a new life, and that is impossible without assessing what the old one was really like, so vividly described in our legendary comic, "The Adventures of Piglet Yakunin."
We are especially interested in violations of antitrust and anti-corruption laws in connection with the installation of geogrid material, the sale of electronic tickets, and the creation of an offshore network of companies, including the one to which the well-known house in Akulino is registered. We demand that V. I. Yakunin be held criminally liable under Articles 174, 178, and 201 of the Russian Criminal Code.
We have not forgotten the other circumstances either—for example, the allocation of official housing to Yakunin's grandson even though he already had his own apartment.
As usually happens, the "authorities" spent a long time sluggishly passing our complaints from one office to another, trying to decide who would deal with them.
At one point, we decided that a political decision had been made not to conduct any inquiry, and we were preparing to raise hell over it, when suddenly we were contacted and told that the inquiry was in fact underway. They even invited our representative to come in with the documents. Not a bad sign, considering that the authorities' gold-standard response to any of our complaints is: "no signs of a crime have been found".
Today, ACF lawyer Vyacheslav Gimadi visited investigator Andrei Alexandrovich Stepanov of the Transport Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Central Federal District, who is handling Yakunin's case.
The ongoing inquiry primarily concerns theft in the procurement of geogrid material (supplied by a Yakunin-owned company) and fraud in the sale of electronic tickets (through a company owned by Yakunin's son).
We'll see what comes of it, but for its part, the ACF is ready to provide all the evidence.
The daily upsetting of V. I. Yakunin is coordinated by Ivan Zhdanov.