BLOCKADE SOLDING OF MR. BLANK

POWER AND MONEY

Today, the activities of individual members of the new St. Petersburg government, Valentina Matviyenko, are alarming in the Kremlin. The concern of the Kremlin residents of St. Petersburg is primarily related to how some of the brightest representatives of the Matvienko team ...

Today, the activities of individual members of the new St. Petersburg government, Valentina Matviyenko, are alarming in the Kremlin. The concern of the Kremlin residents of St. Petersburg is primarily connected with the way some prominent representatives of the Matvienko team relate to the troubles and aspirations of pensioners in the Russian president's hometown. In general, St. Petersburg is an elderly city, out of 4.5 million people, more than a third are people of retirement age. And the complaints of blockade veterans directly to the Kremlin, to Putin, have recently become more frequent. There is especially much criticism of the actions of the youngest member of the St. Petersburg government, Vladimir Blank, who recently arrived in St. Petersburg from the Pskov region and has not yet had time to get used to local realities and traditions.

Vladimir Blank took the post of Chairman of the Committee for Economic Development, Industrial Policy and Trade of the Administration of St. Petersburg (KERPPT) last autumn, immediately after the gubernatorial elections. Prior to that, he was engaged in business, for a year he worked as a vice-governor for investments in the Pskov region. I ended up in Smolny quite by accident from the post of deputy chairman of Promstroybank-SPb.

Blanc's relationship with pensioners somehow did not develop yet in the Pskov region, where in the 90s the criminal case of the Scorpio financial pyramid, which ruined thousands of Pskovians, was sensational. In terms of the scale of scamming depositors, the Scorpion individual entrepreneur was once quoted at the level of such well-known scam offices as MMM, Neftalmaz-Invest, Vlastilina, Chara, and so on. As the Novosti Pskov newspaper reported, as a result of the vigorous activity of the Scorpion private entrepreneur, 7,800 Pskov residents, most of whom were pensioners, suffered damage in the amount of more than 7 billion non-denominated rubles.

Unlike their Moscow masterminds, who in exchange for money offered frantic interest on deposits, cars, shares of non-existent enterprises, Pskov businessmen were more inventive. They allegedly intended to invest in housing construction by depositors' funds. And people gave their last pension crumbs for a good cause.

This is exactly the kind of investment of citizens' savings in residential meters that Vladimir Blank should have carried out, holding the position of head of the semi-state Municipal Financial Corporation. By the way, after the Scorpio pyramid collapsed, its boss Alexei Nedosekin, together with the accountant, received 8 years in prison for two. Blank escaped with a slight fright during interrogations in the investigating authorities, where he was pestered with questions about Scorpio's connections with the Pskov city administration and budgetary funds. Be that as it may, thousands of elderly people were left without a livelihood and waited several years for compensation for deceit.

Another scandal overtook Blank in St. Petersburg already at a responsible post in Smolny, where, by the way, today he is entrusted with the functional duties of doubling the GDP in a single city on the Neva, and, consequently, the fight against poverty, proclaimed by the federal Center on an all-Russian scale. On the day of the 60th anniversary of the lifting of the blockade, President Vladimir Putin came to his hometown for a short visit to lay flowers on the grave of his parents, and veterans of the blockade told VVP something that was not included in television stories. The president told them about the growth of pensions, and those about the unprecedented rise in bread prices in St. Petersburg. Vladimir Vladimirovich, of course, did not see the long queues at the St. Petersburg bakeries, where you could buy a roll for 2 rubles cheaper than in a store. But the conclusions, having learned that in the small homeland bread costs 40 percent more than in Moscow, he made for himself.

The distribution at the federal level was taken over by the head of the Ministry of Agriculture, Alexei Gordeev, who admitted that "it is difficult to explain why bread in St. Petersburg is much more expensive than in the capital, in economic terms." Began to understand and in Smolny. It turned out that the unsatisfactory work of the State Unitary Enterprise Food Corporation, for which Vladimir Blank was responsible in the St. Petersburg government, was the cause of the blockade bread riot. The state unitary enterprise was unable to timely deliver grain to the northern capital from Bashkiria and Tatarstan. Its director was, of course, immediately dismissed by order of the head of the KERPPT. And in order to freeze the prices for St. Petersburg bread, it was necessary to create a stabilization fund in the amount of as much as half a billion rubles. At the same time, Mr. Blank cynically noted that "the city government does not have the authority to regulate prices, since we do not live under socialism."

In a word, if it were not for the President's visit, the blockade survivors would buy bread at Blanc's "market" prices and beyond.

But Mr. Blank did not stop there. At one time he strongly advocated the deprivation of agricultural markets of St. Petersburg for land lease. According to Mr. Blank, agricultural markets do not perform any socially significant function, therefore, they must use the land on general lease terms.

There are 14 agricultural markets in St. Petersburg. Due to rental benefits, food there is often cheaper than in stores, so the buyers are mostly pensioners. One can imagine how delighted they would be at Blanc's innovations, which would inevitably lead to an exorbitant rise in prices for potatoes and other consumer goods. Fortunately, Smolny caught himself in time, and this did not happen.

Now in the hands of Mr. Blank is the distribution of the city order, including medicines for elderly beneficiaries, of whom there are tens of thousands in St. Petersburg. It was assumed that under the new system, the municipal order would be carried out on a competitive basis and this would significantly save budgetary funds. But at the last meeting of the St. Petersburg government, it was categorically noted that the government order today is on the verge of failure. And this is not because the manufacturing firms do not want to sell the same medicines to the city cheaper, it's just that officials headed by Vladimir Blank are not able to process a huge array of tender documentation.

Or don't want to? In this regard, one can hardly expect an abundance of drugs at reduced prices in St. Petersburg pharmacies, which the same Blank is going to privatize everything en masse. Insulin hunger is already familiar to Petersburgers. What unpleasant problems Mr. Blank will prepare for us this time is still a mystery.

These are the signals that come from St. Petersburg to the Kremlin, flock to the administration of the President of the Russian Federation and may soon reach a critical mass.

Everyone remembers the story when the appeal of war veterans, handed over to Vladimir Putin on the day of the presidential election at his polling station, turned out to be very effective and led to the resignation of a high-ranking official of the Ministry of Natural Resources.

Recall that residents of the old suburban settlements of the Moscow region wrote to the president that in the late 1990s, more than 100 hectares of the relict Maslovsky forest were sold to Cotton Way, Yuvi-Plus, Ship Pines and others, who began to cut down the forest under construction of cottages. Igor Sechin, Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation, forwarded this complaint to the Ministry of Natural Resources, where an unprecedented scandal occurred.

Minister Yuri Trutnev instructed Nikolai Garankin, head of the Main Directorate of Natural Resources for the Moscow Region, to verify the facts set out in the appeal. In his conclusion, it was only mentioned about "cutting down individual trees when installing a fence." However, experts from the Federal Service for Supervision of Natural Resources have confirmed the massive nature of deforestation in the Maslovsky Forest. As a result, Garankin was dismissed.

To all appearances, something similar could happen again in St. Petersburg, if Mr. Blank continues to advocate for the norms of life for elderly St. Petersburg residents, as in besieged Leningrad.