Translated material
Bridge and scaffolding
The prosecutor's office again attacks the Yekaterinburg mayor's office
The dark streak that the Yekaterinburg administration has found itself in does not end - the prosecutor's office accused the head of one of the municipal enterprises of collapsing the bridge over the Trans-Siberian Railway in September 2006. According to the investigation, the municipal unitary enterprise "Blagoustroistvo" financed construction projects that did not pass the state examination. Since the beginning of 2007, this is the second major claim by law enforcement agencies against the city authorities.The bridge under construction fell in early autumn, there were no physical casualties, but the moral losses were catastrophic. At that moment, an election campaign for the regional Duma was underway in the region, and United Russia, whose ranks include Sverdlovsk Governor Eduard Rossel and Yekaterinburg Mayor Arkady Chernetsky, called for voting for United Russia, as it provides money for the metro and road junctions. The governor immediately told reporters that the reason for the bridge collapse was a violation of the technological process; Presidential Envoy to the Ural Federal District Pyotr Latyshev, at a closed meeting with journalists, admitted a big problem in the construction complex. He promised “as an officer” to take control of the case, bring the investigation to the end and be sure to inform the residents of the Urals about its results. At the end of 2006, Arkady Chernetsky blamed the designers for the man-made disaster.
But the plenipotentiary representative kept his word - at the end of last week, the district information center distributed a brief information about the results of the investigation, which was carried out by the Office of the Prosecutor General for the Ural Federal District. Investigators' preliminary findings differ greatly from the governor's and mayor's versions. The Prosecutor General's Office proposes to consider the main customer of the work, that is, the Municipal Unitary Enterprise "Blagoustroistvo" to be guilty of the bridge collapse. It was its management that entrusted the design to the Uralgiprotrans company, and transferred the construction to Bridge Squad No. 72.
The prosecutor's office established that construction and installation work was carried out in violation of the requirements of the Urban Planning Code of the Russian Federation: the design documentation did not pass state examination, and there was no construction permit. The worst thing is that during the design there were deviations from the technical regulations that no one noticed. They caused the bridge to collapse. For the first time, the supervisory authority even names a specific culprit, and not just initials, as is customary with the security forces. The message indicates that charges of negligence have been brought against the director of the Municipal Unitary Enterprise “Blagoustroistvo”, Viktor Menshikov. The case will soon go to trial.
The city administration has already asked journalists not to rush to conclusions. The press secretary of the mayor of Yekaterinburg, Konstantin Pudov, said that the investigation had the task of finding the culprit and that is exactly what it was doing. The official hinted that the true reasons for the collapse were deeper. This interpretation in the mayor's office itself is unofficially explained by the surprise that was caused by the statement of the prosecutor's office and the embassy - no one in the administration thought that the blame for the disaster would be placed on the authorities. Moreover, the prosecutor's office accused municipal employee Viktor Menshikov of systematically violating the law. According to investigators, the restoration of the collapsed bridge by MUP continues according to the old scheme.
The Office of the Prosecutor General demanded that the Sverdlovsk Regional Prosecutor's Office promptly inspect all major construction projects, since the investigation learned that two more large road junctions and bridges were being built without permission. The unexpected turn in the story of the bridge collapse became more political news, since this is already the second complaint by security forces against the activities of the municipality in less than six weeks of 2007. Since 2005, the prosecutor's office has periodically seized documents from the administration and initiated criminal cases against city hall employees and their relatives, but this year it is breaking all records.
In January, investigators, accompanied by machine gunners, seized papers from a deputy of the City Duma, now the head of the municipal unitary enterprise is being investigated in a criminal case, and the first conclusions of the investigation indicate that it is not only him who will have to suffer. If the prosecutor's office proves the systematic nature of violations of construction rules, other officials may also find themselves in the dock. In this situation, much depends on the lobbying capabilities of Mayor Arkady Chernetsky. After the January “mask shows,” he managed to get an official reaction from the prosecutor’s office: the leadership of the Sverdlovsk supervisory authority recognized the involvement of machine gunners in the police operation as excessive.