Today's Vedomosti has a stunning article about our old acquaintance, Vladimir Kogan. It turns out that the official income last year of this modest director of the construction department was 830 million rubles (about $27 million at the time). Meanwhile, his ministry salary can hardly be more than 2 million rubles a year (about $65,000 at the time).
Kogan, according to his disclosure, enjoys the good life: he owns five apartments, two houses (one of them in Cyprus), four cars (a Cadillac Escalade ESV, a Land Rover Range Rover, a Mercedes-Benz S 500 4M, and a Porsche Cayenne Turbo), and three small boats. The biography of this multimillionaire official is utterly typical, in the sense that it contains the classic line: The fact is that the businessman had very solid connections at Smolny (St. Petersburg City Hall). In particular, he had access to Vladimir Putin, the influential deputy to Sobchak (Anatoly Sobchak, then mayor of St. Petersburg). And while the mayor himself showed little interest in building the city's banking system, his deputy, on the contrary, tried to take a very active part in the process. So why would a banker, the happy owner of a house in Cyprus and "three small boats," need the low-paid and stressful post of director of the Construction Department at the Ministry of Regional Development? Very simple: Kogan's main line of work is the construction of St. Petersburg's flood-protection dam. During the time Kogan has been in charge of the dam's construction, the estimated cost of the project has doubled—from 55 billion to 109 billion rubles (roughly from $1.8 billion to $3.5 billion at the time). How that happened is unclear.
Apparently this guy walks into the government building, puts on the same look he has in that photo, and says: we've run out of our billions, please give us a few more billions. And the Prime Minister agrees and hands over more billions. Kogan clearly knows how to approach the Prime Minister.
So this guy just sits in the ministry and, under Putin's protection, simply skims off the dam project. Very crude, and very effective. Even our tame Accounts Chamber has spoken out on the subject (see page 161, item 8 and onward). More on the subject here. This is exactly the kind of case that calls for the powerful anti-corruption measures of the Chief Corruption Fighter, whose imminent action we have been hearing about for almost four years now. And let me add something of my own. We do not have the capabilities of the Chief Fighter, but RosPil is quietly looking into another scheme that Mr. Kogan appears to be involved in. It is not on the scale of the dam, of course, but we investigate what our resources allow. I wrote about the scheme involving the procurement of a territorial planning system. It has now been firmly established that the Ministry of Regional Development did, after all, sign an obviously corrupt contract
despite the fact that RosPil got the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) to ban it
This, too, would be a good case for the Chief Corruption Fighter's Powerful Anti-Corruption Measures, but we no longer have any hopes for that. We'll just keep working on it quietly ourselves. It's an amusing situation, really. RosPil, funded by volunteers, quietly investigates corruption. The government, funded by taxpayers, quietly skims off the dam project.