Translated material
Signal period
Manufacturers of fake special license plates convicted
The Timiryazevsky District Court of Moscow yesterday announced the verdict in the scandalous case of a criminal group of former and current intelligence officers, which was engaged in the trade of counterfeit special documents and special license plates for cars. All six defendants were found guilty of fraud and producing false documents and sentenced to terms ranging from two to seven years in prison. True, the court somewhat reclassified the charges for all defendants. Instead of the article of the Criminal Code that the prosecutor’s office charged them with “production of false documents,” they were found guilty of “assistance in the production of false documents.” Thus, the court stated that the persons who directly produced the forgeries (including documents allegedly approved personally by President Putin) remained unidentified.In addition to the trial participants themselves, several dozen people gathered for the announcement of the verdict - journalists, relatives, friends and colleagues of the accused. But the majority of the public, due to the catastrophically small size of the meeting room, did not get inside and crowded in the corridor. And when the three accused who were in custody were being escorted, the organizer of the “criminal group” Vyacheslav Gaspl began making statements to the press, claiming that he was “not guilty of anything.” “This is an election year, and they just want to make us the last in the fight against illegal flashing lights. In two years, everyone will again drive with left-hand license plates and special signals,” Gaspl recited to the television cameras.
The reading of the verdict lasted more than five hours. All six defendants were found guilty of fraud (Article 159, Part 4) and complicity in the production of false documents. The leader of the group, Vyacheslav Gaspl, received the longest sentence - seven years in a maximum security colony. Among other things, he was found guilty of organizing a criminal group itself, illegally crossing the state border (Gaspl is an Estonian citizen) and falsifying a vehicle identification number. Ex-employee of the Foreign Intelligence Service Alexey Tarasov was sentenced to five and a half years, and former Moscow traffic police officer Mikhail Motoriko was sentenced to four years in prison. Motoriko was one of the main witnesses in the case, as he agreed to cooperate with the investigation. He was kept separately from the rest of the accused (in the special block of Matrosskaya Tishina) and was even brought into the courtroom under special guard. “Motoriko cooperated with the investigation, but he was given such a long sentence, although they promised to take this into account,” the lawyer of the accused, Vladimir Zherebenkov, was indignant after the verdict was announced.
Former deputy head of the Main Center for Administrative, Economic and Transport Support of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Colonel Mikhail Shapatin, received 2.5 years in prison. Unemployed Alexander Yakovlev and Alexander Ivanov, by court decision, deserved five years and one month and two years in prison, respectively.
The exposure of this group was announced with pomp by representatives of the FSB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs in December 2005. As reported, scammers were engaged in the manufacture and sale of leftist attributes of power - special license plates, special instructions (exempting cars from inspection by traffic police officers), permits to install flashing lights, special passes to the Kremlin and the presidential administration, etc. According to the stories of operatives, they were able to identify the entire underground chain involved in the production of counterfeits, the main links of which were current employees of law enforcement agencies. As the investigation established, the criminal group was headed by Vyacheslav Gaspl, who was wanted by the Estonian police for drug and weapons trafficking. Fleeing from Estonian justice, he acquired Russian citizenship (illegally, as it turned out) and changed his last name to Cher. And in this capacity, having met a number of employees of the Russian special services, he organized a business selling counterfeits. Representatives of the FSB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs initially said that they were able to prove at least 30 criminal episodes, but in court they were talking about only two.
The first case involved a certain Mr. Rybakov, who heads the legal department of one of the banks. He turned to his friend, a former FSO employee, with a request to get flag special numbers for him. A former FSO employee presented this request to Colonel Shapatin. He agreed to help and spoke about a “legal” scheme for obtaining a number through his friend Alexei Yakovlev, allegedly an employee of the Federation Council. Shapatin demanded $75,000 for a set of special license plates and a flashing light. In fact, Gaspl, according to the prosecutor’s office, developed a different scheme. Through his friend, former traffic police officer Mikhail Motoriko, he selected a foreign car from the computer database identical to the one on which the license plates were to be assigned. Moreover, the cars must not only be the same make and model, but also the same color. In the case of the limousine for the banker, Gaspl chose a special license plate, which is used in Mordovia, to eliminate the possibility of a car with a real license plate meeting the owner of the left plate. A few months after the client received his order, the fake was discovered by traffic police. After this, the development of the criminal group began.
In another episode, scammers were caught making fake blue police license plates for the president of Russian Financial Company AV-Finance LLC, Viktor Volivach. His Mercedes was stopped by traffic police officers on Novy Arbat. Volivach presented the ID of Assistant Minister of Internal Affairs Rashid Nurgaliev. When checking his documents, it turned out that the ID was fake, and the number was assigned to a completely different car.
“The oligarchs who used special license plates knew very well that they were buying fake license plates. But no one held them accountable for this. The prosecution believes that they were “mistaken in good faith,” but because of this they cannot avoid liability before the law. They should also be in the dock. By convicting these people, the structures interested in this will achieve nothing - the bacchanalia on Russian roads will continue. I will appeal the verdict,” lawyer Vladimir Zherebenkov said in an interview with Vremya Novostey.