How wonderful: the nephew of Russian Railways chief Yakunin leased freight cars and then leased those same cars back to Russian Railways.
A major new player may emerge in Russia’s rail freight market. As Kommersant has learned, in 2012 Russian Railways brought in around 10,000 open-top freight cars from the private company RT Operator. The company is controlled by Kirill Amosov, the nephew of Russian Railways president Vladimir Yakunin. The operator owned only about 3,000 cars itself, and leased the rest in order to pass them on to Russian Railways. It should be noted that in the talented Yakunin family of state-connected businessmen, many seem to have a very active entrepreneurial streak:
The dear son has a thriving business running hotels on station-adjacent property (for some reason). A young, successful entrepreneur. I assume the Investigative Committee (Russia’s main federal investigative authority), celebrating its second anniversary today, has already assembled a huge task force and is investigating this promising, high-profile freight-car case. Meanwhile, RosPil’s cooperation with the Investigative Committee is going terribly. They simply refuse to find any signs of corruption in the complaints we send them. What’s more, they won’t even give us the formal "refusal rulings" denying action, making it harder for us to appeal what they do. For example, we had to spend several months dealing with the brazen idler and best friend of corrupt state-procurement operators, investigator Chebotaryov from the Main Investigative Directorate of the Russian Investigative Committee for St. Petersburg, just to obtain his "refusal" in a case of obvious fraud involving a 290 million ruble state contract for houses that had already been built.
Once again, if that still isn’t clear: this is not even a ruling yet that the investigator is unlawfully failing to investigate the case. It is only a finding that it was unlawful for him to withhold his unlawful ruling from us, so that we could at least read why they are not investigating. A battle over a lousy piece of paper saying that "Rafik is completely innocent" (a Russian meme meaning the guilty party is absurdly declared blameless). I say this because RosPil is often asked, "Why is the investigation taking so long? You wrote about it two months ago, and nothing is happening". Of course things are happening, but to move forward even a tiny bit, we have to overcome resistance at every millimeter from crooks on the state payroll protecting the peace of other crooks on the state payroll. Still, never mind — we remember the saying about water wearing away stone and all that. And yes, once again I’m reporting on the fundraising progress. We have raised 9.1 million rubles (about 9.1 million RUB). PayPal remains the leading donation channel. To complete the annual target we still need to raise 1.8 million. How to take part is explained here in a clear and convenient format.