Translated material
Force solution
Searches took place in the Yekaterinburg City Hall building with the participation of masked machine gunners
The Yekaterinburg administration building was again searched, forcing the city authorities to remember 1937 and officially declare: lately investigators have been showing increased interest in the team of Mayor Arkady Chernetsky.12 law enforcement officers appeared on the fourth floor of the Yekaterinburg City Hall, where the offices of City Duma deputies are located, early in the morning on Friday, January 12. The chairman of the representative body, Evgeny Porunov, was presented with a sanction from the regional prosecutor's office to conduct an inspection of office No. 405, where three deputies work: Nafik Famiev, Anton Malkin and Eduard Romanovsky. The head of the investigation team introduced himself as an employee of the regional police department. Mr. Porunov gave the order to open the office that interested the security forces. The investigators spent almost the entire working day in the room - from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
The speaker of the City Duma admitted that he was not surprised by the interest of law enforcement agencies - last year he received a request from investigators investigating a criminal case against one of the parliamentarians. “They informed me about the existence of a criminal case and asked whether such and such a person was a deputy of the City Duma, from which district he was elected,” recalls Evgeniy Porunov. He refused to name his parliamentary colleague, who became a defendant in the criminal case, and emphasized that for the first time in the history of Yekaterinburg, investigators came to the mayor’s office for documents with forceful support. Together with the police officers, two masked machine gunners appeared in the building.
The city mayor's press secretary, Konstantin Pudov, confirmed that until last Friday , special forces did not come to the mayor's office - investigators received all the documents they were interested in without force support. In his opinion, this time too the machine gunners were superfluous - no one thought of interfering with law enforcement officers.
An informed source in the city administration told Vremya Novostey that during the seizure, 65 documents of deputy and businessman Eduard Romanovsky were seized. On condition of anonymity, the newspaper's interlocutor explained that the prosecutor's office suspects the management of Pinta LLC, to which Mr. Romanovsky is included, of tax evasion. Investigators' calculations show that from January 1, 2005 to March 31, 2006, Pinta failed to pay about 4.1 million rubles, entering deliberately false information into tax returns. The sanction from the regional prosecutor's office states that a number of documents confirming the presence of criminal intent are located in the office of Eduard Romanovsky in the city hall building. The businessman himself has not yet commented on what happened - he is not in Yekaterinburg.
City politicians consider the seizure of documents to be part of a targeted effort against the team of Mayor Arkady Chernetsky. By coincidence, the interest of the prosecutor's office in administration employees arose simultaneously with the change in the fall of 2005 of the prosecutor of the Sverdlovsk region. It was under the current prosecutor Pavel Kukushkin that city hall employees were accused of fraud with apartments; the son of one of the vice-mayors became a defendant in another criminal case. The last time investigators appeared in the administration was in December, shortly before the United Russia congress . Less than a month had passed before they came to the City Duma.
“We are certainly ready to cooperate with law enforcement agencies and help them solve crimes,” comments Konstantin Pudov. - However, the “mask show” organized in the premises of the representative body of government is surprising. What is this saber rattling for? Such actions discredit municipal authorities. It’s just something like ’37.” According to Mr. Pudov, city hall inspections take place several times a month.