A very brief update on how things are going. Good news: After the campaign began, the tenders I listed as numbers 4 and 6 in the Sinister List of Fraudulent Tenders (SLFT) were canceled. "Electronic Educational Environment" — 48 million rubles (about US$1.6 million at the time) and 20 days.
and "Student Academic Performance Journal" — 12 million rubles (about US$400,000 at the time) and 20 days.
So, the total value of the canceled tenders came to 170 million rubles (about US$5.7 million at the time), which is of course laughable compared with the overall scale of the theft, but still. Bad news: I’m now starting to doubt that honest public procurement tenders even exist in our country, and in IT they definitely do not. The stream of messages about fake bidding is enormous. I simply can’t process it all. My apologies in advance to everyone I haven’t replied to. My earlier talk about 30% kickbacks now sounds pathetically naive, because people are writing to me saying they actually carry out these projects as subcontractors for just 3–8% of what the client pays. Officials take at least half for themselves, another thirty percent or so goes to the "winner of the tender," and the rest goes to the very people who are supposedly meant to do the MODERNIZATION. We still need help — specifically, competent IT expert reviews of the tenders included in the SLFT. Many thanks to everyone who sends in such reviews — our gratitude is as boundless as the ocean. But we want more. It’s frustrating that the most competent and insightful reviews were for the very tenders that the Ministry of Education (Minobr) prudently canceled on its own. This week (hopefully tomorrow) I’ll post an updated SLFT that we’ll be working from. And a separate message to the crooks: Crooks, stop wasting your time on this nonsense. It would be better if you withdrew all of this from bidding yourselves. Otherwise it will get worse later.