A few things: I wrote on Twitter that we need an optics expert—specifically someone who knows optical sights, binoculars, and so on. There were plenty of jokes along the lines of, "So they’ve finally started fighting corruption for real," but no expert ever turned up. And we do need one. The reason is that our old acquaintances at Rosoboronpostavka (the Russian state defense procurement agency) are buying optical sights.
As you can see, each of the 1PN93-2 sights being purchased has been preliminarily priced at 631,435,000 rubles / 3,500 units = 180,410 rubles. But one minute of searching the internet tells us that the 1PN93-2 sight is being sold at retail (in online stores and secondhand) for 80,000–95,000 rubles. In other words, at half the price.
So when buying in bulk, the price should be not 180,000 rubles, but 70,000. And the lot should cost not 631 million rubles, but 380 million less. Accusing someone of inflating the price of a defense contract is a serious matter, and we are not going to throw around such accusations lightly. It is possible that we are missing something. That is exactly what RosPil was created for—to sort these things out. So this is a request to everyone who understands optics: please study this case very carefully. It is possible that there are separate “civilian” and “military” specifications. We seem to have compared the specifications of the sight being purchased with the one on sale, and they appear to be the same. But specialists need to check. They are buying not only sights there, but other optical equipment as well, for a total of 1.5 billion rubles. It would be good to check the other lots too. Obviously, grenade launcher sights are not sold in stores, so we will not be able to compare prices, but there are binoculars, laser rangefinders, and other items that are sold to anyone who wants them. All the lots can be found here. We would be very grateful for any help. Write to us here: rospil2011 @ gmail com 2. I am pleased to report that the Chelyabinsk regional office of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) killed off the procurement of the miracle Magellan system, which we had challenged. Media reports on the subject started appearing a couple of days ago, but today we managed to reach Chelyabinsk by phone and they confirmed everything. A funny story unfolded there: just as we said, no one except a specially “tailored” company would enter the tender. And that is exactly what happened. There was only one bidder, with the wonderful name LLC “Tenders and Offsets.” After all the noise we made, this bidder—who did not have to compete with anyone—immediately dropped the price from 25 million to 10 million rubles, which kind of gives us an idea of the size of the kickback originally expected. At 10 million, “Tenders” was declared the winner, but FAS still canceled the results (whether because of our complaint or someone else’s, we do not yet know for sure), because the documentation had been drawn up in violation of the rules. Someone in the Chelyabinsk regional government is now bitterly regretting the loss of several hundred thousand dollars in kickbacks, but on the bright side, the region as a whole now has the opportunity to announce a proper competitive tender for this work at a reasonable price (2–4 million rubles instead of 25 million). Thus, the total value of fraudulent procurements canceled with RosPil’s help now stands at 283 million rubles. 3. You can donate to RosPil here. So far, 4,484,641 rubles and 50 kopecks have been raised. 4. RosPil is recruiting lawyers here.