Judicial circles seethe: a competition for the post of chairman of the Moscow City Court has been announced. They started talking about the possible resignation of Olga Egorova, who is called the symbol of "Basman justice." The New Times understood the peculiarities of the Moscow judicial system
The powers of Olga Egorova will expire only in December, but the judicial "pre-election" race, the start of which was given by the High Qualification Board of Judges (VKKS), has already begun. However, there are no applicants yet. “To date, not a single application has been submitted,” said Anatoly Avtamonov, spokesman for the HQCJ. Even Egorova is in no hurry to run for office, although according to The New Times, she has no intention of leaving the chair. They say that Yegorova even met with Vladimir Putin and discussed her future prospects. How this conversation ended and what guarantees Prime Minister Putin gave or did not give her is a mystery.
goose hunting
The first serious personnel decision that Dmitry Medvedev will have to make will be connected with the Moscow City Court. Olga Egorova's office is not just a city court, it is the largest court in Europe both in terms of the area it occupies and the number of judges. In his competence - and the loudest political processes of recent years. Of all Russian courts, the Moscow City Court is the most cited and public.
Egorova headed the capital justice in January 2001. There was no time for settling down and getting up to speed - the case of Vladimir Gusinsky was being promoted. During the seven years of Yegorova's reign, that case was forgotten, and the term "Basman justice" became a household name. But the Yukos case is still widely heard, everyone remembers the scandals around the hearings on the murder of Paul Klebnikov, and the Moscow City Court itself has been shaking all these years from internal strife associated with Yegorova’s tough management style.
One of its main competitors is now called the former deputy chairman of the Moscow City Court Alexander Paukov, who was dismissed a year ago: Olga Egorova refused to approve him for a new term. Spiders was far from the first on the list of those who did not work well with Egorova. For a similar reason, the chairman of the Presnensky Court of Moscow, Irina Kupriyanova, left her post. Due to the conflict with Yegorova, Sergei Pashin, one of the authors of the first post-Soviet judicial reform, also left the Moscow City Court. Finally, the loudest scandal was associated with the name of judge Olga Kudeshkina, who openly accused her chairman of putting pressure on the court. Kudeshkina claimed that Olga Egorova demanded that a “correct” decision be made in the case against investigator Pavel Zaitsev, who was involved in the history of furniture smuggling - the Three Whales case. 1 According to lawyer Viktor Parshutkin, in most cases, Egorova used the same scheme: she simply transferred the objectionable judge from the court of first instance to the cassation instances. Along the way, she formed her team, inviting judges from the regions. The backbone of Egorova's guard, according to Parshutkin, was made up of judges Natalia Olikhver, who is now in charge of the murder of Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank Andrei Kozlov, Elena Guchenkova and Dmitry Fomin.
Phone-cover law
“Rumors about Egorova’s replacement are circulating in the Moscow legal community with enviable regularity,” lawyer Vadim Prokhorov says in an interview with The New Times. “The last time they talked about this was after the resignation of Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov, who is rumored to have close ties with the head of the Moscow City Court.” The connection was quite simple: the ex-Prosecutor General was attributed to the so-called group of security forces, which at that time consisted of the deputy head of the presidential administration, Igor Sechin, Ustinov himself, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, and FSB director Nikolai Patrushev. For Olga Egorova, the FSB is also a close agency: her husband is an FSB general. “It is absolutely pointless to sue someone from the representatives of the power bloc in Moscow,” says lawyer Parshutkin. “This also applies to the Prosecutor General’s Office, and the Federal Penitentiary Service, and the Ministry of Justice, not to mention the Moscow government, which, in principle, does not lose courts.”
However, Egorova herself denies all the accusations: in one of the interviews she stated that telephone law does not work in Moscow courts, and none of the judges take bribes. 2 “I am convinced that judges in Moscow do not take bribes. If there are doubts, I turn to the qualification board. Then they write about me that I “put pressure on cases” on those who were deprived of their powers. And, of course, it hurts me, - said Yegorova. - I can’t say that I’m so insensitive - I don’t react to anything. It hurts to tears when they write nasty things.
If “nasty things” about Yegorova are still being written at least somewhere, then they are already refusing to speak. None of the lawyers interviewed by The New Times agreed to speak openly about the system built by Yegorova. As one of the lawyers said: “One can agree with Egorova, the telephone law in Moscow courts is really almost no longer valid. Nobody needs to call. All the judges already know what decision they have to make.” In this, by the way, you can find its advantages. According to Parshutkin, corruption in the Moscow City Court under Yegorova has dropped sharply, remaining high at the level of district courts. It is pointless to pay someone in the Moscow City Court, Yegorova's system does not imply "unexpected" sentences.
System
The principles of legal proceedings in Moscow are not distinguished by ingenuity.
First, the decision must be accusatory. There is a problem with acquittals in Russia: there are so few of them that they do not even fit within the framework of statistical error, and in Moscow each such decision is perceived as an emergency. For example, in 2007 in the Meshchansky Court, out of several thousand court verdicts, only about 20 were acquittal. Each time, according to The New Times interlocutors in the legal community, the judge was called "on the carpet", and some of these decisions were subsequently canceled by a higher authority - the Moscow City Court. According to lawyer Viktor Parshutkin, the majority of acquittals, if they happen, come in jury trials. It is no coincidence that folklore has long renamed the Moscow City Court into Mosgorshtamp.
Secondly, the Moscow City Court actually never cancels the convictions of the first instance. It is possible to review an acquittal, but if a person has already been decided to be imprisoned, then it is almost useless for him to go to the Moscow City Court.
Thirdly, the lawyers say, every judge knows that he cannot, a priori, make a decision directed against the defendant-official. Especially when it comes to a Moscow official. Few can remember the judicial defeats of Mayor Luzhkov. The Moscow mayor reciprocates the judges. An example of this is the new building of the Moscow City Court on Preobrazhenskaya Square, and the simplified procedure for judges to receive housing, and lower rates for renting premises. “Yes, Moscow is the owner of the Moscow City Court building, it is in my operational management,” Yegorova admitted. — We pay rent: last year we paid 17 million rubles for all the courts. Maybe not the money that is taken from banks or joint-stock companies. Normal government fees. At first they counted big money - something around 400 million rubles. I had to convince... 3
Reform or decoration?
Interlocutors of The New Times in the presidential administration name the Supreme Court as a possible future place of work for Olga Yegorova. The position of a member of the Supreme Court is formally, of course, a promotion. However, in the administrative market, it is not the position that matters, but the resource behind it. From this point of view, the post of chairman of the Moscow City Court is a much more influential place. So far, the place of the first deputy chairman of the Supreme Court is also vacant, but, as they say, Yury Chaika is being tipped for him, and they are already quite confident about his resignation from the post of Prosecutor General.
At the same time, even court employees disagree on whether the possible resignation of Egorova will become a symbol of the beginning of the Medvedev “thaw” or a purely formal decision, after which nothing fundamentally changes. Before Olga Egorova, the Moscow City Court was headed by Zoya Korneva, whom lawyers remember as “a woman of the Stalinist plan, under which there was still a certain order and decisions of district courts were sometimes canceled.”
According to Henry Reznik, president of the Moscow Bar Association, no matter who heads the Moscow City Court, little will change for lawyers. “I need to build relationships with any chairman, because I have the legal community behind me,” says Reznik. “I’ll even deal with the devil.” But the judges have a different attitude towards the possible change of the head of the Moscow City Court. Two of them, in a conversation with The New Times, admitted: "When Yegorova leaves, we will get drunk."
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1 The New Times wrote about the results of the investigation in No. 4, January 28, 2008.
2 Interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta, March 24, 2005.
3 Interview with Vedomosti, 7 June 2006.
