Russia's chief military medic arrested for tender fraud

Yesterday, the Moscow Garrison Military Court authorized the arrests of the head of the main military medical department of the Ministry of Defense and the head of the Kirov Military Medical Academy (GVMU and VMA), Major General Alexander Belevitin and his subordinate Colonel Alexei Nikitin. According to the investigation, military officials, for a kickback of €120 thousand received from the former Deputy Minister of Health of the Russian Federation Alexei Vilken, ensured the little-known Dina International CJSC victory in the tender for the supply of a Philips tomograph to the district military clinical hospital in Podolsk for 120 million rubles. Now, according to participants in the investigation, such equipment can be purchased at half the price.

The operation to detain General Belevitin and Colonel Nikitin, as Kommersant learned, involved 15 operational investigative groups, consisting of employees of the 10th operational investigative bureau of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, military counterintelligence and special forces of the FSB, as well as the main military investigative department of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation. (GVSU).

Early in the morning of June 1, having received assignments, the groups dispersed to 15 addresses in Moscow and St. Petersburg. However, in the office offices of the State Military Medical University and the Military Medical Academy (both structures are located in St. Petersburg), Alexander Belevitin and his deputy at the main directorate, who also heads the 2nd directorate of the military medical department, Alexei Nikitin, were not there. They were not found in St. Petersburg apartments either. Relatives and colleagues of the military whose homes were searched reported that on May 30, the general and colonel urgently left for Moscow. They were detained there.

Colonel Nikitin was taken when he was leaving the entrance of a house in the Golovinsky district, where he also had an apartment. According to some reports, the military medic did not immediately surrender to the special forces, having entered into hand-to-hand combat with them. However, the forces turned out to be unequal.

General Belevitin was not in his Moscow apartment. Then the capture group went to another address - to the house on Rubtsovskaya embankment, where the head of the main organizational and inspection department of the Ministry of Defense Olga Chernova lives. According to the participants in the operation, during the searches they received information that the general could be with his colleague Chernova, but the door was not opened to them. After a long squabble (an entry about it was included in the protocol), the special forces decided to enter the apartment through a closed door using a special ram. After two or three blows, which the door withstood, General Belevitin opened the locks and surrendered (the Ministry of Defense did not comment on this incident, saying that the department was actively cooperating with the investigation).

Yesterday, Alexander Belevitin and Alexei Nikitin were taken to the Moscow Garrison Military Court, which considered the investigators' requests for their arrests. Justifying his appeal, the representative of the GVSU, in particular, said that the general and the colonel were suspected of committing a serious crime. According to the investigation, in 2009-2010 they received large bribes as part of an organized group (clauses “a” and “d”, part 4 of article 290 of the Criminal Code), and due to the fact that they occupy senior positions in the military department , can influence their subordinate witnesses and destroy evidence in the case. The presence of several dwellings for each of the suspects, investigators believe, indicates that they have the opportunity to hide from justice. Finally, the main argument was an operational report from the FSB, according to which the suspects in their telephone conversations discussed options for the murder of former Deputy Minister of Health of the Russian Federation Alexei Vilken, who is the main witness in the case.

Mr. Vilken, Director of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise "Directorate of the Single Customer-Developer of the Federal Agency for Health Care and Social Development" Vadim Mozhaev, General Director of Rosslyn Medical Leon Zilber and Head of the Department of Control in the Social Sphere of the Control Directorate of the President of Russia Andrei Voronin, as Kommersant has already reported, were arrested in November last year for attempting to steal $1 million by fraud from the Russian representative office of the Toshiba concern.

Let us recall that, according to the investigation, Andrei Voronin used for personal enrichment a high-profile scandal involving government procurement at inflated prices for the needs of the regions of expensive medical tomographs and other medical equipment, which arose in July 2010. Then the head of the control department, Konstantin Chuychenko, Mr. Voronin’s immediate superior, reported to President Dmitry Medvedev in front of television cameras that the department had identified numerous facts of purchases of tomographs at prices three times higher than the market price. The President called this situation “a cynical, boorish theft of public money” and immediately ordered an investigation to be carried out and those responsible to be brought to justice.

After this, Andrei Voronin, through intermediaries, notified the general director of the Russian representative office of the Toshiba concern, Rustam Bakhtiozin, that his company was included in the black list of unscrupulous suppliers, allegedly created by Rosfinmonitoring. At the same time, the attackers claimed that the companies on the list would no longer be able to participate in government tenders for the supply of equipment. For exclusion from the list, Andrei Voronin demanded $1 million from Rustam Bakhtiozin. The participants in this scam were also detained by DEB officers.

Andrei Voronin, counting on leniency, entered into a pre-trial cooperation agreement, and the Tverskoy District Court sentenced him to three years in a general regime colony. Having learned about this, Alexey Vilken also decided to cooperate with the investigation, telling about other episodes of criminal activity in which he took part. Since one of them involved high-ranking military personnel, the case materials were transferred to the Main Military Investigation Department of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation.

Having opened a criminal case in April of this year based on the materials of the DEB, the GVSU established that in 2009, Alexey Vilken, having learned that the Ministry of Defense was going to announce a tender for the purchase of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner for the district military clinical hospital in Podolsk, contacted the management GVMU. Having said that he represents the interests of Dina International CJSC, Mr. Wilken offered to buy a top-end MRI model from Philips, which provides scanning of organs in 64 slice planes (for comparison, 16-slice MRIs are used in ordinary hospitals). According to the intermediary, the most complete and modern software is attached to the tomograph he offers. In particular, for diagnosing the cardiovascular system, brain, bone skeleton and even cancer. For the victory of this equipment in the competition, the military demanded that the intermediary pay them in cash 10% of the price that the Ministry of Defense would give for it.

According to the investigation, when preparing documents for the competition, the leaders of the State Military Medical University included in it parameters that only the closed joint-stock company, which Mr. Vilken represented, could offer. In particular, the supplier promised to include MRI service and personnel training in working with it in the price of the lot. In 2010, Philips was acquired for 120 million rubles, and the officials of the State Military Medical University, as Mr. Vilken told the investigation, received from him a total of €120 thousand (the amount of the kickback in ruble terms was 4.7 million rubles). The advance to the general and colonel, at their request, amounted to €10 thousand each.

It is interesting that one of the episodes of the general receiving money, namely €15 thousand, was even recorded by video equipment installed by the FSB military counterintelligence in his office, albeit within the framework of another criminal case. It was not possible to establish who brought the money to the general and for what. And the video footage came into play only after Mr. Wilken began to cooperate with the investigation and reported that it was he in the recording.

In court, suspects Belevitin and Nikitin, as well as their defense attorneys, offered bail in the amount of 2 million rubles. or choose a measure of restraint for them in the form of house arrests. Defenders talked about their services to their homeland (see reference) and poor health. However, the court believed more in Mr. Wilken’s public testimony, which stated that he “really feared for his life and safety” after testifying against the military. The general and colonel were arrested by the court until August 1 of this year. Their defense is going to appeal the decisions in the Moscow City Court.

Sergey Mashkin, Nikolai Sergeev

The general was too close to victory