Translated material
Debt prison
The prosecutor's office does not want to leave the head of the defense plant free
The prosecutor's office of the Ulyanovsk region yesterday sent a cassation appeal against the verdict of the Zasviyazhsky District Court of Ulyanovsk, which sentenced the former general director of Ulyanovsk Mechanical Plant OJSC Vyacheslav Abanin to a suspended sentence for non-payment of wages. For more than a year, employees at the enterprise did not receive the money they were entitled to, as a result of which on August 19, 2004, several thousand desperate workers staged a spontaneous protest, blocking one of the main transport intersections of the city.The action, which paralyzed traffic in Ulyanovsk for several hours, attracted the attention of not only the authorities, but also the prosecutor's office. The scandalous nature of the emergency was also made by the fact that the Ulyanovsk Mechanical Plant is a strategic enterprise (it produces self-propelled anti-aircraft guns and components for missiles), part of the Almaz-Antey air defense concern.
After a month-long inspection of the activities of the enterprise’s management, the prosecutor’s office opened a criminal case against the director of the plant, Vyacheslav Abanin, under articles of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation “non-payment of wages” and “embezzlement”. The investigation materials took up 130 volumes. On September 8 of this year, the court found Mr. Abanin guilty, considering, however, that an honorary citizen of Ulyanovsk, suffering from a number of diseases, could serve a five-year suspended sentence. But the court imposed the largest fine in the history of the Ulyanovsk region on Mr. Abanin - 450 thousand rubles.
The management of the enterprise owed wages to more than 6 thousand of its workers in the amount of more than 100 million rubles. The workers did not receive remuneration for their work from July 2003 to August 2004, until they took to the streets. The average salary at the plant is about 6 thousand rubles, and for most of its employees the current situation was simply catastrophic.
As the investigation established, the management of the enterprise did not pay wages, citing a lack of funds, but at the same time did not make any efforts to collect these same funds from their debtors. According to the prosecutor's office, at that time the subcontractors owed Ulyanovsk Mechanical Plant OJSC more than 300 million rubles, which was quite enough to pay off the salary debt, but there was no recourse to arbitration, as required by law. The investigation revealed facts of non-payment of wages even at a time when the plant had money. By the way, the director admitted guilt for these episodes, as well as for embezzlement. He was charged with this charge after it turned out that he provided free cellular communications at the plant’s expense not only to his family members, but also to his housekeeper. In total, as the prosecutor’s office found out, at the expense of the enterprise, Mr. Abanin’s household said 670 thousand rubles. For the remaining episodes, the now former director of the plant does not admit his guilt and considers them normal business activities.
This definition, in his opinion, includes relations with the NNT-Pharma company, one of the co-founders of which was Abanin’s son. At the time of the start of cooperation with the Ulyanovsk Mechanical Plant, the company existed only on paper, but within a year, thanks to the powerful support of the plant, buildings were built for it and German equipment was purchased. During the period considered by the investigation alone, the volume of economic turnover with NNT-Pharma amounted to about 80 million rubles. This amount included not only direct cash transfers, but also assistance with construction materials and work that the mechanical plant performed for the company, but which remained unpaid. Abanin also denies his personal interest in these transactions.
It is noteworthy that the second co-founder of NNT-Pharma, Kuznetsov, was recently shot in his own home. This happened after he testified in the case of Mr. Abanin in court. The relationship between these two events is now being checked by the Department for Particularly Important Cases of the Ulyanovsk Region Prosecutor's Office. At least two more episodes that aroused suspicion from the prosecutor’s office were not included in the charges. The first is the plant’s transfer of 5 million rubles to the Volga hockey club, made almost on the eve of the enterprise’s financial crisis. This money was then supposed to be returned to the plant, but it disappeared. The second episode is settlements with another Ulyanovsk plant - Iskra - which are now being checked by the regional UBEP.
In court, the state prosecutor asked for the totality of charges to sentence Vyacheslav Abanin to five years in a general regime colony. But the court, taking into account the defendant’s past merits and state of health, decided that a suspended sentence was sufficient, which was supplemented by a fine. But the prosecutor's office considered this sentence too lenient, and yesterday a cassation appeal was issued against him. Investigators noted, among other things, that the amount of the fine did not even cover the costs of telephone calls to the relatives of the plant director. Now the court will return to Mr. Abanin’s case in a month.