In Zabaykalsky Krai, Chita Deputy Mayor Vyacheslav Shulyakovsky has been detained on suspicion of abuse of office. “Today <...> Vyacheslav Shulyakovsky, deputy mayor of the city of Chita and chairman of the Infrastructure Development Committee of the Chita city administration, was detained on suspicion of abuse of office. A search was conducted at Shulyakovsky’s residence,” the Investigative Committee of Russia reports. According to investigators, Shulyakovsky was involved in a scheme in 2012 in which unidentified individuals, acting in collusion with officials from the Chita city administration’s Infrastructure Development Committee, stole nearly 13 million rubles from the city budget that had been allocated for the purchase of apartments for orphans. http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2400736 RosPil has been fighting Monsieur Shulyavsky, a prominent member of United Russia (the ruling pro-Kremlin party), since 2012.
This crook was skimming money off a classic scheme using Latin letters. Basically: Money was allocated to buy apartments for orphaned children. Shulyakovsky and his gang would announce apartment procurements at 15 million rubles, while in reality the apartment cost 7 million. To make sure no one entered the tender and drove the price down, they inserted words written in Latin characters into the procurement documents, so no one could find the listing on the government procurement website. Interestingly, the legal entity that “won the tender” had been registered just three days before taking part in it. Here are the two procurements: http://zakupki.gov.ru/pgz/public/action/orders/info/common_info/show?notificationId=3204664 http://zakupki.gov.ru/pgz/public/action/orders/info/common_info/show?notificationId=4506948 Regarding both auctions, our RosPil activist Valera Zolotukhin immediately filed complaints with the prosecutor’s office of Zabaykalsky Krai. You can read them here and here. He asked for an inspection to be carried out and, if the actions of the contracting authority’s officials showed signs of a criminal offense, for the case materials to be forwarded to the appropriate official for consideration of whether to open a criminal case. The matter was dragged out for a long time, but in the end the prosecutor’s office, having found violations, sent the materials to the Investigative Committee, which then opened a case. It was precisely to prevent these kinds of Latin-letter tricks from happening again (and there were some truly disgusting cases) that RosPil in 2013 ran an entire campaign against the use of Latin letters. Then a RosPil coordinator attended an Open Government working group and presented our proposals for combating this kind of abuse, where he received support. Then a bill was introduced in the State Duma by Dima Gudkov, and now this problem no longer exists—the public procurement website was improved under our collective pressure, and its search engine no longer distinguishes between Latin and Cyrillic letters. Zolotukhin did a great job. Separately, the Anti-Corruption Foundation expresses its gratitude to Andrei Zatirko, a journalist with the Chita.ru news agency, who provided invaluable assistance in this case and, through his activity at the local level, did not let it die out. The Anti-Corruption Foundation exists on donations from private individuals. If you support what we do, you can take a look here.