It has been exactly two years since I wrote that we were working on the "Hungarian embassy case". And now:
Criminal case opened over the Ministry of Regional Development's purchase of the Hungarian trade mission building The Ministry of Regional Development bought the building in central Moscow for 3.5 billion rubles from Renova, which had purchased it from Hungary for 575 million rubles; Vekselberg had previously said he would be very surprised if a case were opened Read the full article
From the very beginning, there were enough documents to open a case and launch a real investigation.
$60 million (or $90 million, by other estimates) was stolen through such a simple scheme that the investigation should have taken three months, and then the case files could have been sent to court. But there was no investigation. We found the appraisal report ourselves. We repeatedly appealed the brazen replies from the Investigative Committee: no elements of a crime were found. We uncovered astonishing documents in the case materials. Nevertheless, no case was opened, and Basargin—the crook who had headed the Ministry of Regional Development—went off to practice his "effective management" as governor of Perm Krai (a region in Russia). The building, bought for an insane amount of money, stood empty. Well, better late than never. Though I should note that if the investigation had been led by any member of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, all those involved would have long since received guilty verdicts in an honest, fair, adversarial trial, without any "calls from above." Now let's see how the Interior Ministry handles the investigation. We gave them all the necessary materials a very long time ago.