Translated material
Raiders on Screen
Having fought off the swindlers, the academician himself went to trial
The Nagatinsky District Court of Moscow recently sentenced the general director of Promintel Group LLC (PIG), 40-year-old Dmitry Eidelman, to three years in prison. He was found guilty of fraud, which, according to investigators, resulted in the raider seizure of the building of one of the leading Russian manufacturers of medical equipment - OJSC Scientific and Production Association (NPO) Ekran - and its subsequent legalization. The businessman himself did not admit guilt. It is noteworthy that the victim in this case - the general director of Ekran, President of the Academy of Medical and Technical Sciences of the Russian Federation Boris Leonov - simultaneously ended up in the dock, and the investigation of the case was accompanied by a number of scandals in medical circles.This case was opened by the Investigation Department (ID) at the Internal Affairs Directorate for the North-Eastern Administrative District of Moscow in August 2007 at the request of the general director of Ekran. He said that the NPO was created in 1988 on the basis of the All-Union Scientific Research and Testing Institute of Medical Equipment of the USSR Ministry of Health, in 1993 it was transformed into an OJSC and is engaged in the development, testing, certification and production of medical equipment for a wide variety of purposes. Among Ekran’s regular customers are the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Emergency Situations and the FSB.
As follows from Mr. Leonov’s statement, Ekran owned a complex of non-residential buildings on Kashirskoye Highway and Kasatkina Street. The facilities on Kashirskoe Highway were built back in Soviet times, but Ekran’s management did not have time to register them. Since the areas were located on the territory of the Russian Cancer Research Center (RORC) named after. N.N. Blokhin, the latter at some point began to lay claim to them. As a result, a protracted litigation began in arbitration court between RONC and Ekran. While the trial was ongoing, the NGO owed the cancer center a debt of almost 8 million rubles in utility bills, which Ekran did not immediately pay.
Since the proceedings between RONC and Ekran proceeded in arbitration at first with varying success, Mr. Leonov began to look for specialists in corporate law, and one day he was introduced to Dmitry Eidelman. Thanks to the efforts of the latter, in November 2004 the court actually satisfied Ekran’s claim, recognizing its ownership of the complex of buildings on Kashirskoye Highway. But it soon became clear that documents had been submitted to Mosregistration not only for the buildings on Kashirskoye Highway, but also for one of the Ekran buildings on Kasatkina Street, the owner of which was going to be a certain PIG company. The general director of Ekran wrote a statement to the Federal Registration Service stating that the submitted package of documents was fake, and the latter suspended the registration.
Mr. Leonov contacted law enforcement agencies, alleging fraud, but a criminal case was opened only in 2007. Moreover, even after this there was practically no investigation. As a result, one of Mr. Leonov’s numerous complaints about the inaction of the investigator of the Investigative Department at the Internal Affairs Directorate of the North-East Administrative District came to the attention of the leadership of the Investigative Committee (IC) under the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which transferred it for further investigation to the Main Investigation Department (GSU) of the Moscow Main Internal Affairs Directorate. Only after this did the investigation move forward and suspects emerged.
Among them were the former general director of PIG Sergei Zhmurko, the new head of this company, who turned out to be the same Dmitry Eidelman, as well as construction investor Sergei Balyberdin. Since the first two fled the investigation and were put on the wanted list, they were charged in absentia. In relation to Mr. Balyberdin, the case was separated into separate proceedings and suspended due to his serious illness.
In October 2008, detectives from the Department of Economic Crimes of the North-Eastern Administrative District were still able to find Mr. Eidelman - he was detained and taken to the Main Investigation Department, where he was charged with fraud. Moreover, the investigators eventually came to the conclusion that it was Mr. Eidelman who organized this scam, and with the approval of the Tverskoy District Court of Moscow, he was arrested.
“We established that Eidelman knew about the existence of an economic dispute between the Russian Scientific Research Center and Ekran and decided to take advantage of this situation - to take possession of non-residential buildings,” senior investigator of the State Investigative Directorate, Major of Justice Alexander Popov, told Vremya Novostey. - To do this, he involved Zhmurko and other unidentified persons, in respect of whom separate proceedings were allocated. A false assignment agreement dated March 12, 2004 between the oncology center and PIG was prepared. From this document it followed that the latter allegedly bought out Ekran’s debt from the Russian Scientific Research Center for utility bills for 7.5 million rubles. At the same time, a forged letter was also fabricated, which the cancer center allegedly issued to the PIG, about the transfer of money to the fictitious Tsentrstroy LLC. As a result, PIG received the rights of claim to Ekran without paying anything to RONC. In addition, a number of false documents were produced necessary for registering the transaction with the Federal Reserve System: a compensation agreement between Ekran and PIG, according to which the latter, in exchange for the claim previously allegedly acquired from RONC, received from Ekran two non-residential buildings located on the street Kasatkina, 3, building 2, and Kashirskoye Shosse, 24, building 26; false BTI documents for buildings; a power of attorney on behalf of Leonov and notarized copies of the constituent and registration documents of Ekran. All of them were submitted to the Federal Reserve, whose employees did not notice anything suspicious. However, a little later, the registrars decided that some more documents were missing, which notified both parties to the transaction. Thus, the secret fraud became known to the management of Ekran. Based on Leonov’s statement, registration was suspended and subsequently terminated. We regarded these actions as an attempt to steal buildings.”
However, according to the investigation, the raider seizure of Ekran’s buildings did not end there. As follows from the case materials, in July 2007, Mr. Eidelman again submitted to the Federal Reserve a package of false documents similar to the previous one, adding to it another forgery - an additional agreement to the compensation agreement. It followed from it that Ekran allegedly transfers to PIG as compensation only one building, located on Kasatkina Street, with a total area of more than 3 thousand square meters. m. And as a result, on July 13, 2007, PIG still formally became its owner.
“In order to retain the ownership rights to a 5-story building acquired by fraud and to legalize it as soon as possible, Eidelman, Balyberdin and others on July 24, 2008 sold it to a certain Mix LLC for 11 million rubles, while its market value was about 82 million rubles,” said Alexander Popov. - At the same time, all participants in this transaction knew that it was insignificant. As a result, the premises were registered with Mix. During the investigation, it was established that neither PIG nor “Mix” conducted any financial and economic activities and were in fact front structures. However, Eidelman and his accomplices could not fully take advantage of the rights of the owner, since Ekran “went on the defensive”, not allowing the raiders into the building. In addition, this building was rented by a state institution - the All-Russian Scientific Research and Testing Institute of Medical Equipment (VNIIIMT), the head of which was also Academician Leonov. But Eidelman solved this problem too. In January 2008, the head of Roszdravnadzor Nikolai Yurgel (resigned in February 2010) dismissed Leonov from the post of general director of VNIIIMT, and Eidelman was appointed acting general director in his place. And this despite the fact that appointment to this position requires approval from a number of government and regulatory authorities.”
Having studied the arguments of the investigation, the court came to the conclusion that the defendant Eidelman’s guilt in fraud and legalization was proven. However, the court acquitted him of attempted fraud on the first count due to insufficient evidence and excluded Eidelman’s participation in a criminal group from the charges. As a result, Mr. Eidelman's sentence turned out to be relatively lenient - three years in prison, and he should be released in the near future. His lawyer Marina Chizhova has so far refrained from commenting, as has Mr. Leonov’s representative.
Meanwhile, Boris Leonov himself recently also found himself in the dock. As it turned out, a criminal case against him was opened on March 27, 2006 by the Main Directorate (GU) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Central Federal District (CFD). According to investigators, Mr. Leonov allegedly falsified six minutes of the general meeting of shareholders in 2002-2006, transferring the assets of NPO Ekran to his subsidiary Ekran-M LLC. Despite the fact that the shareholders of NPO Ekran assured the investigation that they voluntarily signed the protocols in connection with the increasing frequency of raider attacks on the company’s property, the investigation came to the conclusion that Mr. Leonov deceived the shareholders into signing the documents. As a result, the case was sent to the Tagansky court, where it is now being considered.
It is noteworthy that the participants in this story appear in other criminal cases. Thus, in February last year, the investigative department of the Taganskoye Department of Internal Affairs opened a case against Mr. Balyberdin for the theft of 40% of the authorized capital of the capital's Inafkompani LLC. Formally, Mr. Balyberdin is still passing through it as a witness. And Mr. Zhmurko, who is on the wanted list, is also accused of stealing a building from another company.