Our volunteer monitors from the RosPil project found this remarkable tender and sent it to us. The Chelyabinsk Region Ministry of Industry and Natural Resources is procuring services for the refinement, development, and expansion of a specialized software resource for the ministry’s needs. ** Starting contract price: 25 million rubles. Deadline: 70 days**. Here
25 million for REFINING a software resource (called "Magellan") is, of course, possible. But in that case, the software itself would have to be something truly extraordinary. And the tasks it handles would have to be large-scale. And yet, with all due respect to the Chelyabinsk Region Ministry of Industry, we have no information suggesting that it remotely controls a spaceport or owns Yandex. Of course, there is a lot of industry in the Chelyabinsk Region—an awful lot. But it would be very naive to assume that this industry is somehow connected to this "specialized software resource." Google and Yandex know nothing about a software resource called "Magellan" that supposedly requires 25 million rubles. So we started looking into it in detail. Just in case the Chelyabinsk Region Ministry of Industry really is carrying out some kind of super-mission that requires super-software. Maybe they have a secret base of torpedo boats on their books for fighting Somali pirates. It turned out that the 25,000,000 rubles are needed to refine the existing specialized software resource "Magellan" for several structural subdivisions of the Chelyabinsk Region Ministry of Industry and Natural Resources (essentially, an upgrade to an electronic document management system):
The guys want to "get rid of routine work." Incoming and outgoing correspondence. That is, without a doubt, a noble goal. So what part of the Chelyabinsk Region Ministry of Industry will this expensive "Magellan" system actually free from routine work? Here is the ministry’s structure. Spending 25 million on REFINING the system will "free from routine" 6 subdivisions out of the existing 27.
And here, by the way, is our hero. Valery Valentinovich Prudskoy, the Chelyabinsk Region Minister of Industry and Natural Resources and the organizer of this tender.
You can see from Valery Valentinovich’s face that he is desperate to get rid of routine work. And he will spare no expense to do it. Public money, of course. Let me conclude with a series of entirely reasonable questions that RosPil is putting to the Governor of the Chelyabinsk Region, the regional antimonopoly service, and the regional prosecutor’s office: Electronic document management systems are among the most widespread and advanced software products in the world. There is plenty to choose from. Why does the Chelyabinsk Region Ministry of Industry need to invent its own product and then spend 25 million rubles refining it? How much did the "Magellan" system cost in the first place, if nearly a million dollars is needed just for its REFINEMENT? Isn’t it a bit excessive for the Chelyabinsk Region to install such suspiciously expensive systems for six departments of a single ministry? Doesn’t this "getting rid of routine work" look very much like the routine transfer of 24.5 million rubles to Valery Valentinovich Prudskoy and unidentified persons associated with him, with only the remaining 0.5 million going toward refining a glitchy homemade document management system for six departments of the Chelyabinsk Region Ministry of Industry? As usual, we are now filing complaints about all of this. If you want to help with expert assessments, you’re welcome. If anyone has insider knowledge about the scheme described above, write to us—we’ll look into it. Applications for this tender are currently being accepted. We very much hope that the result of this post and our letters will be that V.V. Prudskoy reins in his appetites and postpones buying yet another apartment, and that the contract is awarded at a price appropriate to the market and the scale of the task. Update. According to Valery Prudskoy, in order to say that the stated price for services to refine the specialized software resource is inflated, it is necessary to have the full amount of information about what work needs to be done. “To judge whether it is expensive or not, you need the full amount of information,” the minister commented in response to Alexei Navalny’s statement. /////// Perhaps V.V. Prudskoy will be very surprised by this fact, but I would like to remind him that by law the "full amount of information" must be in the tender documentation, which is publicly available. And if he did not include that "full amount" there, then that is a serious violation.