Shubik's Cube

The death of the main witness against St. Petersburg police officers took the Prosecutor General's Office by surprise

At the end of last week, entrepreneur Semyon Shubik died in St. Petersburg. It’s unlikely that anyone would have paid attention to this regrettable, but still quite ordinary event for a big city, if the death of this unknown person had not confused all the cards in a big political conflict between the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor’s Office (ICP) of the Russian Federation and the St. Petersburg police.

Semyon Shubik was the owner of the Frunze fruit and vegetable base, which fell into the hands of raiders in 2005. This case became a modest episode in a whole series of criminal cases, the investigation of which was conducted by employees of the Department for Combating Organized Crime (UBOP) of the Central Internal Affairs Directorate for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region. Subsequently, the operatives managed to collect evidence against dozens of leaders of interregional criminal groups operating in Russia since the early 1990s who had remained unpunished for some time. The leaders of the so-called “Tambov”, “Kolesnikovsky” criminal communities and a number of ethnic “brigades” who traded in raiding found themselves under investigation and behind bars.

But the case of Semyon Shubik was not brought to its logical conclusion. At the end of 2005, it was transferred to the Investigative Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation; in 2006, the materials on the Frunze fruit and vegetable base were taken over by the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation. And in November 2007, this criminal case was transferred to the deputy head of the 2nd department of department No. 1 for the investigation of particularly important cases of the Main Investigation Department of the UPC, Oleg Pipchenko. And in his production everything turned out in such a way that the culprits in the raider seizure of Shubik’s enterprise were none other than operatives of the St. Petersburg Organized Crime Control Department. And Semyon Shubik himself became the main witness for the prosecution.

According to his testimony, detectives for especially important cases of the St. Petersburg Organized Crime Control Department Vasily Borovitsky and Azer Tofik-ogly Aliev asked him to sign three blank sheets of paper, and then handed over these papers, as stated in the protocol, “in an unspecified place to unidentified members of the criminal community,” who subsequently captured the fruit and vegetable base. As a result, on July 1, during a joint operation of the SKP and the St. Petersburg department of the FSB, Borovitsky and Aliyev were detained. Thus, the defendants in this criminal case are those who began its investigation three years ago, after which events took a completely unpredictable turn.

Deputy Head of the Organized Crime Control Department of the Main Internal Affairs Directorate for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region, Vladimir Sych, resolutely defended his subordinates and held a special press conference on July 4. He stated that Borovitsky and Aliyev appeared at Shubik’s after a criminal case had been opened at his request, and, accordingly, the operatives had no reason to take any papers from Shubik and hand them over to unidentified persons. In addition, having detained the policemen, the SKP, according to Mr. Sych, provided them with a confrontation not with Shubik himself, but only with his wife, who said that her husband had told her about the papers handed over to the operatives. And in the last refutation, Mr. Sych noted that the person in whom, according to the case materials, these ill-fated sheets were found, does not know Borovitsky and Aliyev and does not even have a clue who they are. And the next day, July 5, Mr. Shubik died suddenly, leaving the prosecution without the main witness.

Law enforcement agencies in St. Petersburg immediately stated that the death of Semyon Shubik was not violent. And Vladimir Sych told reporters that the criminal case against operatives of the Organized Crime Control Department is a provocation directed against the leadership of the St. Petersburg police in general and against the head of the Main Internal Affairs Directorate for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region, Vladislav Piotrovsky in particular. According to the head of the Organized Crime Control Department, the nature of such accusations is simple: “Vladimir Barsukov-Kumarin is under arrest, but the investigators now have nothing to go to court with. And the investigators, in order not to fail the case, are trying to get to him through those who are under investigation or already Convicted. And they, of course, set their own conditions. So, the arrest of the Organized Crime Control Department operatives was the revenge of Badri Shengelia. I have information that he agreed to testify against Kumarin, and for this he asked to punish those who imprisoned him. And Borovitsky and him were imprisoned. Aliyev".

The SKP refused to respond to such statements, but noted that they would have enough evidence of the guilt of Borovitsky and Aliyev even without Mr. Shubik and that the reasons for his strange death would still be clarified. And it is possible that new details will be revealed.

In turn, the St. Petersburg Central Internal Affairs Directorate has no doubt that the SKP will not stop at two operatives of the Organized Crime Control Department. “Employees of the Investigative Committee have long been trying to find incriminating evidence on me and on the head of the Central Internal Affairs Directorate, Vladislav Piotrovsky,” Vladimir Sych told a Vremya Novostey correspondent. “And they ask all those involved in raider cases what kind of business they had with us. And I I’m ready for the fact that soon people in civilian clothes will come for me.”

Meanwhile, many local observers believe that in fact the cause of this conflict is much deeper and is purely political in nature. The fact is that the department that will put an end to Kumarin, Shengelia and others like them will put an end to the most influential inter-regional criminal communities, that is, it will put an end to an entire era that began in the “dashing” 90s. But such fame has never bothered anyone. Therefore, there are two points of view on the fight against St. Petersburg raiders.

According to one of them, it was the people of St. Petersburg who began the investigation of hundreds of raider cases and, not without the help of Vladislav Piotrovsky, who headed the criminal police of the northern capital for several years and then became the head of the Central Internal Affairs Directorate, they found the only way to complete them. They did not consider each seizure in separate proceedings, but with the support of the St. Petersburg prosecutor’s office, they began to initiate criminal cases immediately based on the facts of organizing criminal communities. And it was the St. Petersburg Organized Crime Control Department that began arresting the raiders. But, sensing the growing glory of the police of the northern capital, in January last year the General Prosecutor's Office announced that from now on it would deal with all the raiders. Three months later, having taken all the materials from the St. Petersburg Organized Crime Control Department, federal structures carried out mass arrests of members of various organized crime groups who had not yet been arrested by St. Petersburg residents and were involved in raider takeovers of dozens of enterprises. And Kumarin was also taken by employees of the central apparatus of the special services in August last year. But if Badri Shengelia, Vyacheslav Drokov and Andrei Leukhin have already been sentenced for the developments of the St. Petersburg Organized Crime Control Department, even for short terms, then with Kumarin everything is still very complicated. The Organized Crime Control Department of the northern capital believes that investigators from the Prosecutor General’s Office simply rushed to make the arrest.

The second version was generated by the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation, which latched on to the accusation that they were “in a hurry.” According to Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika, the investigation into raider cases in St. Petersburg stood still and was delayed for no apparent reason. After this, rumors began to circulate about the corruption of the St. Petersburg police. And in connection with all this, it was decided to transfer the investigation to the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation, without which a good half of the arrests simply would not have taken place. And from the point of view of the federal department, the St. Petersburgers generally wanted to remove Kumarin from charges.

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Thirteen cases of Vladimir Barsukov

The Investigative Committee under the Prosecutor's Office (SKP) of the Russian Federation has completed the investigation of one of the criminal cases of raider takeovers in St. Petersburg, in which businessman Vladimir Barsukov (Kumarin) is accused. His lawyer Sergei Afanasyev announced this yesterday. “The investigation into two episodes has been completed - the seizure of the Petersburg Corner cafe and the Smolninsky department store,” said Mr. Afanasyev. -- In the near future, these materials will be transferred to one of the district courts of St. Petersburg. In total, Barsukov is suspected of 13 episodes of raider attacks in St. Petersburg.” Barsukov was arrested at the end of August last year in St. Petersburg, and is now in custody in one of the pre-trial detention centers in Moscow. The Russian Prosecutor General's Office charged him with organizing a criminal community, fraud, and money laundering. He had previously been charged with organizing murder, murder and attempted murder. According to the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation, in 2004, Barsukov and other members of the group, among whom were natives of the Tambov region, created the so-called “Tambov” criminal community in St. Petersburg. Members of the criminal group, according to investigators, committed raider attacks, as well as murders and attempted murders. Investigators believe that between July 2005 and June 2006, Barsukov, together with his accomplices, committed fraudulent acts against 13 commercial enterprises in St. Petersburg, the total value of which was about 5 billion rubles. RIA Novosti

Mikhail TELEKHOV, St. Petersburg