Three bags of criminal cases
taken out of AvtoVAZ
Promising that Russian prisons will soon be filled with “economic” criminals, Yevgeny Primakov most likely had in mind the former and current leaders of AvtoVAZ. Based on the facts of the crimes they committed, the Prosecutor General's Office opened a series of criminal cases. It is interesting that Primakov himself pointed out the “scapegoats” last Saturday. “There is AvtoVAZ, the largest enterprise that has been avoiding taxes for three years,” he said. Most likely, the plant fell into disgrace not by accident. It is no secret that AvtoVAZ is closely connected with the Executive Secretary of the CIS Boris Berezovsky, whose structures have recently been subjected to massive attacks by the authorities.

They didn't burn everything
It would seem that criminal groups associated with AvtoVAZ can breathe easy. In the fire that destroyed the Samara Regional Internal Affairs Directorate, almost all the documents and computer base for the special operation “Cyclone”, which the Ministry of Internal Affairs carried out in Tolyatti, burned. Let us recall that over the past year and a half, police officers have been collecting incriminating evidence on the plant’s managers and have opened hundreds of criminal cases. They, in particular, found out that eight criminal groups, through dealerships established or intimidated by them, actually controlled the shipment of 80% of the auto giant's finished products. Many of the dealer companies belonged to relatives of the heads of government agencies, law enforcement agencies of Tolyatti and deputies of the local Legislative Assembly. At the same time, most of the proceeds for the cars were not returned to the enterprise, and it, in turn, could not pay taxes in full.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs put an end to this state of affairs, and the trials were about to begin. But now much of the evidence has been destroyed by fire. In addition, many investigators and operatives who were involved in AvtoVAZ affairs tragically died. Immediately after the incident, the surviving policemen began to be threatened by unknown bandits: “Are you still alive? Well, look: the police station has burned down and we will find a way to deal with you.”
The problem turned out to be so serious that at the funeral of Samara policemen, the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Sergei Stepashin, spoke about it. He promised that the criminals would not escape the answer and that the ministry had enough materials left to put the robbers behind bars. Literally the next day, Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, at a meeting of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, said that AvtoVAZ had been circumventing taxes for three years by “buying and selling sand.” As a result, the plant owed the budget 2.4 billion rubles (the total debts of the enterprise to budgets of various levels are about 4.5 billion rubles).

Money in the sand
AvtoVAZ, indeed, pulled off a clever deal with the imaginary resale of a large batch of Dagestan sand, which Kommersant spoke about in detail in December last year. The operation scheme is approximately as follows. AvtoVAZ took a bill of exchange loan of 15 billion rubles from the St. Petersburg insurance company Constanta and used it to buy about 50 million tons of sand from one of the Dagestan quarries. Then it was delivered to a certain company "Rados", which did not pay for the goods. The operation was insured by the same Constanta, and it compensated AvtoVAZ for its losses (also in bills), but VAT was not included in the insurance. As a result, the auto giant demanded a tax refund (2.2 billion rubles) from the state, which, strictly speaking, was almost equal to the enterprise’s debt to the state. But the deal was declared invalid and, as the governor of the Samara region, Konstantin Titov, said, it greatly spoiled the relationship between the management of the enterprise and the government.
It is worth noting that the interest of law enforcement agencies in AvtoVAZ is also explained by connections with Boris Berezovsky’s plant: several years ago, the Logovaz company was engaged in the re-export of Tolyatti cars. Now all the structures close to Berezovsky (such as Sibneft, ORT, Aeroflot) are under massive attack by the Prosecutor General's Office, the FSB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Re-export operations of Logovaz and AvtoVAZ have always caused criticism from tax and law enforcement agencies. A batch of new cars was allegedly sent for export from the plant at prices lower than domestic Russian prices (the difference reached several thousand dollars per car). She crossed the border only on paper, but in reality she remained in Tolyatti. Then, with the help of other documents, the cars were allegedly imported back to Russia, and, accordingly, the dealers’ income increased by the difference between the export and domestic Russian prices. This scheme itself was invented by Berezovsky. However, without the support of AvtoVAZ management, in particular the chairman of the board of directors of the plant, Vladimir Kadannikov, it was impossible to implement it. And according to some reports, it is under Kadannikov that investigators are now actively “digging.”

No currency
However, for now the details of the investigation at AvtoVAZ are kept secret. “In one of our offices we have three bags of criminal cases related to this plant, and I don’t know which of them were examined by the Prosecutor General’s Office,” a high-ranking employee of the Investigative Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs told a Kommersant correspondent.
The Prosecutor General’s Office itself only names the articles of the Criminal Code under which the actions of the auto giant’s management fall: theft by deception, failure to return funds in foreign currency from abroad and tax evasion (all criminal cases were initiated based on the facts of crimes committed. - Kommersant). “Even if we prove half of these crimes, the entire former top of the plant will be behind bars for a long time,” said one of the investigators.
The information center of the car plant pretended that nothing serious had happened. An employee of the press center stated that all the management of the enterprise was at their workplaces and did not call anyone to the investigator. They did not hide taxes and did not hide currency abroad. And in general, the car plant has no currency for a long time, and there is nothing to pay taxes on: the enterprise is full of substandard cars. Taxes that can be hidden will appear when the cars can be completed and finally sold.

ALEXANDER Kommersant-STROGIN, OLEG Kommersant-STULOV, ANDREY Kommersant-SAMARIN, KIRILL Kommersant-GORSKY

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 25 dated February 20, 1999, p. 1