September 2010 . 35-year-old GITIS graduate Ilya Farber moves with his family from Moscow to the Tver region and gets a job at a school in the village of Moshenka, teaching drawing, music and literature.

February 2011. The head of the local administration, Lyubov Valeeva, offers the teacher to become the director of a rural club, where renovations have not been completed. 2.5 million rubles were allocated from the budget for the restoration of the building, but Farber comes to the conclusion that the estimates are inflated and the work is being performed poorly. He decides to sue the contractor, the general director of the Gorstroy-1 organization. However, he promises to speed up the repairs - and Farber abandons the legal battle and begins to invest his own funds in the work. The contractor promises to reimburse all costs.

September 2011. Ilya Farber goes to Tver, to the office of the general director of Gorstroy-1. He promises to return to the teacher the money he spent on repairs. The contractor asks Farber to sign a certificate of completion of work and gives him more than 132 thousand rubles. At the exit from the office, Ilya is detained by officers from the Tver FSB Directorate. It turns out that the general director of Gorstroy-1 wrote a statement about extortion. The bills Farber received were marked. He is arrested on charges of receiving a bribe (Article 290, Part 3 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) and abuse of official position (Article 285, Part 1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). A few months later, the teacher was charged again with taking a bribe of 300 thousand rubles.

According to investigators , in July-August 2011, Ilya Farber received 300 thousand rubles from the general director of Gorstroy-1 for the opportunity to continue repair work in the cultural center, and in September of the same year - about 132 thousand more for signing a certificate of completion of work. However, the renovation is not complete. By signing the work acceptance certificate, Farber caused damage to the institution’s budget in the amount of 941,000 rubles, investigators believe.

June 19, 2012. The court in the city of Ostashkov begins to consider the case of Ilya Farber. The defendant insists on participating in the trial by a jury.

June 28, 2012. The jury finds Farber guilty of accepting a bribe and abuse of power. At the same time, the panel does not consider the defendant worthy of leniency. According to Novaya Gazeta, pressure was put on the jury. In particular, the publication writes that on the day the verdict was announced, the judge advised the panel not to pay attention to the defendant’s testimony. Journalist Olga Romanova, who covered the trial, said that it took place with numerous violations and had a clear accusatory bias. As Newsru.com reported, citing eyewitnesses, the prosecutor said that he measured the amount of damage from an audio recording on which “30 crunches of five thousand dollar bills” were heard.

August 10, 2012. The Tver Regional Court sentences Ilya Farber to 8 years in a maximum security colony and a fine of 3 million 200 thousand rubles. The authority also deprives the defendant of the right to hold any positions in government bodies and local self-government related to organizational, distribution and administrative and economic activities for 2 years.

Ilya Farber has three children, two of whom are minors. He also suffers from compression fractures of two vertebrae following a road accident. According to Farber's eldest son, his father must remain on bed rest, while in the pre-trial detention center he was not allowed to lie down for a long time.

How Ilya Farber was given 8 years