Police at Transneft Transneft minority shareholder Alexei Navalny has forced the police through the courts to investigate who receives the billions donated by Transneft For the past two years, Transneft minority shareholder Alexei Navalny has been trying to find out where Transneft’s enormous charitable spending is going. In 2005-2008, it amounted to nearly 15 billion rubles, and the company does not disclose the recipients of the funds. Read in fullThis article is in the blogs[?]
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zav-jj Vedomosti writes today about our small but very satisfying victory over the police, who have been covering for the “Effective Managers” at Transneft. Unfortunately, we were unable to sentence the entire staff of the Central Administrative District police department (Moscow district police) to execution. Though in terms of fraud, idleness, and sheer incompetence, it is clearly one of the most “advanced” units in Russia’s Interior Ministry. Since the summer of 2008, they have been reviewing my complaint demanding an investigation into Transneft’s charitable payments. Half a billion dollars disappearing into the murky depths of Big Business over two years deserves scrutiny, doesn’t it? Out of that entire sum, we managed to find only 1 billion rubles, which was sent to some supposedly very noble cause: the charitable foundation “Kremlin-9.” We even managed, uhhhh... to persuade one of Transneft’s directors, Oleg Vyugin, to raise the issue of disclosure, but that led nowhere. So there you have it. For almost two years the cops kept stringing me along. Rejection-appeal-rejection. In the end they simply said: we don’t know anything, the file has been lost. An internal review? Okay, an internal review was ordered, but never carried out. We don’t know why. Feel free to complain. So we decided to come at it from another angle and challenge the Interior Ministry’s unlawful inaction as a whole, since it was obstructing access to justice. The Tagansky Court postponed the hearing three times. The cops didn’t show up / the prosecutor didn’t show up / the documents weren’t sent, and so on. Like, sure, we’ll fax the documents right now. We wait two hours—no documents. In the end, it seemed to me that the people in uniform had driven even the judge up the wall. So when the hearing finally took place, the Central Administrative District police department was given a virtual dressing-down. Even the prosecutor supported my demands. You can see the court ruling here. We have already submitted requests to have all those involved formally cited for incomplete professional compliance (a disciplinary sanction in Russian state service). We may not get that far, but we’ll definitely get their bonuses taken away :) Of course, I have no particular illusions about the court ruling—I remember how nervously every official starts darting their eyes around at the mere mention of “Transneft”—but they won’t be able to keep brushing off our complaints quite so bluntly anymore. Stay tuned.