It’s always nice to share good news. Well then, my dear friends. Congratulations to you. And to me as well. Let me state it plainly: bloggers in Russia (or, more broadly, the outraged online public) have taken down Gazprom, the open joint-stock company, along with its police generals on the payroll. A reminder. Gazprom’s “effective managers” skimmed off 2 billion rubles (about US$65 million at the time) through gas trading schemes. But they weren’t very careful about it. A criminal case was opened. When Gazprom’s effective managers realized things were starting to smell bad, they delivered two suitcases full of money to our beloved police. The police, setting aside their uncompromising fight against corruption for a while, began dismantling the case and, first of all, removed Gazprom employee Dmitriev from criminal prosecution. Not agreeing with this state of affairs, I called on everyone to take part in the process. The Interior Ministry received 512 official complaints. Nothing like that had ever happened before. An enormous number of reposts appeared on blogs and forums. By my estimate, at least a million people learned about the antics of our “national treasure” (a common ironic reference to Gazprom). I know for a fact that a real scandal broke out inside the police because of all this uproar. The guys who took the money to bury the case had promised to do everything quietly and cleanly. But instead there was both noise and dust. That doesn’t exactly fit with the directives of the Party and the Government. After long torment and suffering, the competent authorities finally produced the required result.
A scanned copy of the letter was forwarded to me by a comrade from St. Petersburg. I still don’t have one myself, although it turns out all this happened back on September 1. So together we managed to kill off that unlawful ruling. Unfortunately, the case is still in the hands of the same malicious investigator, M. Grishina. We’re working on that. Obviously, this victory is procedural and interim. Obviously, they will now keep trying to wreck the case, only by more cunning methods. Obviously, the chances of success are still not that great. But it’s still nice. Right now the investigation has switched to a brainwashing tactic. They are summoning Gazprom shareholders for questioning—people who, at my urging, also filed complaints. People show up, and the questioning is canceled. The goal is obvious: a person comes twice, wastes their time for nothing, and the third time they say to hell with it and don’t go. But that’s all right. They won’t wear everyone down. Our ranks are growing. Reporting in: as of today, I am no longer acting alone, but on behalf of a group of shareholders. The total number of shares is about 530,000. In money terms, that’s more than US$3 million. By Gazprom standards it’s tiny, of course, but it’s something. The powers of attorney are still coming in. A reminder: anyone who wants to join the group of Gazprom fucker-catchers in any capacity can do so here. Once again, thank you to everyone who took part. Who wrote, posted links, spread the information among friends, and provided any other help or support. Special thanks to the deputies: Sergei Mitrokhin of the Moscow City Duma and Ilya Ponomarev of the State Duma, for promptly organizing parliamentary inquiries at the first request. That’s that. And I’d also ask for some promotion for this post. It’s not only reports of failures that should be pushed to the top. Let people hear about a small victory too. Let’s raise the morale of the warriors of good. And let the Gazprom people sit there in their Mordor, read this post, and spit venom at their screens.