QUESTION BY THE CURB

In the city of St. Petersburg, my friend Seryoga lays asphalt and installs curbs. He doesn’t stand in the middle of a construction site with a shovel in a grimy robe, he’s neat and fashionable. Sergei hires workers, purchases asphalt, rents road equipment and organizes the work. He is the final link in the chain of many city contracts and subcontracts; after him there are no intermediaries and kickbacks. After it there is only asphalt and curbs.

My friend is a keen professional: on a walk, picking up a piece of asphalt with the toe of his stylish shoe, he talks about grain fractions. In a tavern over a glass of beer - about the technology of cast asphalt, types of rollers and milling machines. And of course, about money.

“There are two types of customers,” Seryoga explains, “those who build for themselves, and those who participate in the pyramid.”

The pyramid, in his understanding, is the principle for carrying out any major construction project. At its top is the main customer and a lot of money. Below are contractors, hired, as a rule, through a competition and who paid part of the money received from the customer for winning it. Even lower are subcontractors who got work thanks to kickbacks to contractors. Even lower - other subcontractors and other kickbacks, this time smaller. And finally, the base of the pyramid is the direct performers. People like Sergei and others like him. Just enough money reaches the base of the pyramid so that the performers, with a profitability of 5-10% (and a little rollback), will still do the work for which the rest of the pyramid participants will be accountable.

Seryoga himself sometimes does not know what his serial number is in the chain of intermediaries: he works directly with the one who pays him the money. It is not known exactly how much money he receives from those allocated for the work he does. According to his estimates, from 50 to 20% depending on the project.

“And the price is so good,” my friend laughs. “Look, in the end I get, for example, 750 rubles.” for laying 1 sq. m of two-layer asphalt pavement. Somewhere around 490-500 rubles. will cost the material plus equipment rental plus workers' salaries. The result is about fifty rubles per meter. If the volume is large, it’s still back and forth, but what if we are only offered to roll up a site of a thousand square meters? But you still need to grease up in different places, issue all sorts of permits, and come to an agreement with traffic cops. The equipment is oversized, it requires escort, fencing - all these are again bribes, because no one will do anything for nothing.

Therefore, performers save on everything. Control, according to Serega, is not a hindrance: customers are aware, it is important for them to report, and a laboratory report on the compliance of the coating with standards costs only 5-10 thousand rubles. What’s interesting is that the work is required to be guaranteed for three, and sometimes even five years. But Sergei has never had to answer under a guarantee - no one needs this. If something sag or falls apart somewhere, the customer is much more interested in redoing everything for money - a new pyramid, new kickbacks and bribes.

By the way, according to my friend, it is not only corrupt laboratory employees and traffic cops who take bribes. It is considered normal practice, even in commercial construction organizations, to butter up lawyers or other workers coordinating contract documentation. Moreover, this is done by employees of the same company, interested in a businessman close to them getting the contract. For a kickback, of course.

It’s another matter when the customer contacts the contractor directly. As a rule, we are talking about small projects such as the construction of access roads to private factories or warehouses. Interested in ensuring that their trucks do not get stuck in the asphalt or fall into holes after the first winter, such customers control the quality themselves, but are willing to pay decently. Working with them, according to Sergei, is much more interesting: profitability reaches 25%. And he really regrets that there are few such clients.

Even being part of the bribe-kickback system and feeding from it, Seryoga hates this side of his business. Moreover, years of work on the road front slowly turned a liberal-minded young man from a good family into a fierce radical, albeit a little naive. For example, here is his recipe for correcting the current situation: put an evil security officer with a wad of money at the head of every major road project. So that he personally monitors everything, accepts the work and only then pays off. When asked what to do if the security officer also starts stealing and the road falls apart again, Seryozha answers without a smile:

- Just shoot.

ILYA ZINOVIEV

From rollback to asphalt