“Those who organize rallies are enemies of Russia, and if it were up to me, I’d throw them in jail,” the Chechen leader said. According to him, 30,000 people have no right to “decide for the country’s population of more than 100 million.” Kadyrov also lashed out at one of the leaders of the protest movement, Alexei Navalny. “Navalny is a real loudmouth and stands against the people of Russia, against the state... At the same time, in his exposés he doesn’t name names because he’s afraid. Navalny is a coward,” the head of Chechnya declared. //////// I have no idea why Hero of Russia Kadyrov thinks I don’t name names (there are plenty of those), but especially for him, I’m ready to name several of his closest associates who, in RosPil’s view, should a) be kicked out of public service with a filthy broom, b) become defendants in criminal cases, and c) end up in the dock. Let’s see whether Governor R. A. Kadyrov is ready to be not just a loudmouth and stand with the people of Russia, whom his closest comrades are robbing.
It all started with Drugoi’s famous post, “Mercedeses for Grozny”. On April 21, 2011, Chechnya’s Interior Ministry published a procurement order for passenger vehicles worth 113 million rubles. Among other things, the Chechen police wanted 15 Mercedes-Benz E350 4MATIC vehicles and one Porsche Cayenne Turbo Tiptronic S. After this procurement received broad media coverage, the customer itself canceled the tender. However, the very next day after the first auction was canceled, RosPil discovered that Chechnya’s Interior Ministry had posted a new order with essentially the same documentation. The same 113 million rubles, the same Cayenne. We decided to look into it quietly, without drawing attention. What we found was very interesting. If the data on the electronic trading platform where the order was posted—and accordingly, the data on the official public procurement website—are to be believed, there was not a single bid submitted for the auction. That situation allows the customer, subject to approval by the regional office of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (UFAS), to purchase the same goods not through competitive bidding, but from a single supplier. To find out whether such approvals had been granted, we contacted both UFAS and the customer itself.
Full text of the request UFAS replied that no approval had been granted. We still have not received any response from Chechnya’s Interior Ministry. We then started looking into how often this kind of situation occurs at Chechnya’s Interior Ministry. And it turned out not just to be frequent, but practically constant. On the electronic trading platform’s website, the picture looks roughly like this:
You can verify this yourself using the search functions on the electronic trading platform’s website. The overwhelming majority of auctions conducted by the Interior Ministry of the Chechen Republic were declared unsuccessful. That means this ministry has in fact not been conducting competitive bidding at all—and hasn’t for quite a long time, since September 2010. In addition to most auctions failing, some procurements have no records posted at all. In other words, there is nothing to find. To understand the scale of the violations, you can look at the summary table we prepared. On the dedicated website for publishing information on all state contracts, the latest information on contracts by the Interior Ministry of the Chechen Republic dates back to August 2010. Under the law, however, the customer is required to submit for public posting information on all contracts it concludes under Federal Law No. 94-FZ (Article 18 of 94-FZ). Since there are no contracts, the conclusion suggests itself: either the ministry was effectively not operating and bought nothing for a year and a half, or all contractors and suppliers were selected, and the money was routed, illegally and under the table. There was also a possibility that the customer had submitted the information, but it had not been posted on the website for technical reasons, for example. To make sure, we contacted the Federal Treasury of Russia, which is responsible for maintaining the contract registry. And we received a reply stating that they had fulfilled all of their obligations on their end:
Full text of the reply from the Federal Treasury In its reply, the Federal Treasury advised us to request an inspection by the Federal Antimonopoly Service of Russia and Rosfinnadzor (the federal financial oversight agency). So that is what we did. We wrote to the FAS, Rosfinnadzor, the Office of the Government of the Russian Federation, the Finance Ministry, the Presidential Administration, the Prosecutor General’s Office, and the Investigative Committee of Russia. In our appeals, we described the situation and asked all of them to initiate and carry out inspections of Chechnya’s Interior Ministry. We received almost no clear response from any of them. The agencies either referred us to one another or sent replies like these, from which it was nearly impossible to understand anything concrete. As a result of long, tedious correspondence, hellish bureaucracy, and our complaints being passed around in circles, Rosfinnadzor (the agency authorized to oversee the targeted and efficient use of budget funds) added Chechnya’s Interior Ministry to its inspection plan and in 2012 will conduct a full audit of its activities. The Federal Antimonopoly Service of Russia is supposed to impose an administrative fine under the Code of Administrative Offenses on ministry officials—20,000 rubles for each unposted state contract. Things are even more tangled with law enforcement. Back in June, we appealed to the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation regarding these violations, because such blatant breaches of 94-FZ and total disregard for the rules governing procurement amount to willful failure by ministry employees to perform their official duties. Our complaint was sent down from the federal level to the republic itself for review. An investigator for especially important cases from the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for the Chechen Republic was assigned to it. At the end of August, I was even summoned for questioning by official notice (!!!), apparently forgetting that people are questioned and summonses are sent out after a criminal case has been opened, not during a preliminary review. We sent our formal explanation, with all the details and a full account of the known facts, to Grozny first by fax and then by mail. Here is the text. After that, things developed strangely. By all rights, the review should long since have been completed; all deadlines had expired. As a result, we should have received either a ruling to open a criminal case or a refusal to do so. But we received neither. Over this, we filed separate complaints with the court and with the prosecutor’s office. However, on February 1, we received a fax from the Investigative Directorate for Chechnya stating that our complaint had not been treated as a crime report, but as an ordinary citizen appeal. This decision by the Chechen Investigative Directorate is obviously unlawful, since the higher authority had instructed it to review our complaint under the Criminal Procedure Code, exactly as we had requested in the complaint itself. It is clear that the entire point of the Chechen Investigative Committee’s actions is to cover up the violations. We are now appealing the actions of the Investigative Directorate and seeking criminal liability for the officials responsible. To sum up: Federal money sent in huge quantities to meet the needs of the Interior Ministry of the Chechen Republic is being spent in a completely shadowy and fraudulent way. Contractors and suppliers are simply appointed by decision of Interior Ministry employees. We do not believe this could happen without kickbacks. The Chechen police have become so brazen from their impunity and permissiveness that they do not even bother to pretend, even formally, that they are following the established rules for spending budget money. The investigative bodies and the prosecutor’s office of Chechnya and the Southern Federal District are doing everything they can to obstruct the investigation and are part of the same cozy insider circle. More generally, one might wish that officials so outraged by the slogan “Stop Feeding the Caucasus” (a Russian nationalist slogan criticizing federal subsidies to the North Caucasus) would at least be a little more careful in the methods they choose for stealing. They are not even embarrassed. Now let’s move on to the names Governor Kadyrov says he wants so badly. Those directly responsible for conducting all the auctions and preparing the records and other paperwork are Interior Ministry employees—the members of the auction commission—and in every auction they are the same people: Deputy Chairman of the Commission Albert Esaevich Gaisultanov Commission Members Ramzan Yusupovich Aldebirov Apti Yunusovich Kaisarov Sergei Alexeevich Gorlov Erik Ilyich Kamelyanov Secretary (and also the customer’s contact person for all auctions) Vakha Umanievich Isakov And the person who approved and signed all the auction documentation was the Deputy Minister of the Interior of the Chechen Republic, police colonel R. A. Edilov
. It is obvious to all of us that fraud and violations on this scale could not have taken place without the sanction of Chechnya’s Interior Minister, Ruslan Shakhaevich Alkhanov.
These are the people who should be asked how they spend the money that Allah gives them. So there you have it: names, documents, and even, just in case, a few photographs. We await the reaction of Hero of Russia Kadyrov, who is not a loudmouth, as well as that of the Russian leadership, which claims that budget money in Chechnya is not stolen but spent efficiently and in accordance with established procedures. The spread of this information is welcome. The country should know its heroes.