Chinese equipment was mistaken for Belarusian

The Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Oryol region opened a criminal case of attempted fraudulent theft of 216 million rubles - almost a third of the funds allocated from the budget for the construction of a water deferrization station in the regional center. According to the investigation, Smolensk Construction Company LLC (SSK), which performed the work, tried to install Chinese equipment at the site instead of the Belarusian equipment provided for in the contract. This scandal became one of the motives for the dismissal of the region’s Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Parakhin.

Photo: Evgeny Pereverzev, Kommersant / buy photo

Elena Semina, the official representative of the Orel Region Prosecutor's Office, told Kommersant about the initiation of a criminal case. According to her, the investigation is being conducted on the basis of materials from the prosecutor's investigation into the attempted fraudulent theft of 216 million rubles. (Article 30 and Part 4 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) from funds of the federal, regional and municipal budgets. The case is being processed by investigators from the regional Department of Internal Affairs. According to law enforcement officers, the contractor, Smolensk Construction Company LLC, tried to install at the iron removal station not the cleaning equipment provided by the contract from the Polymerkonstruktsiya company (Vitebsk, Belarus), but Chinese one.

According to Sergei Kostikov, the head of the municipal institution Orel Capital Construction Administration, which acted as the customer, the total amount of the contract concluded with SSK in April 2013 was 569 million rubles. “Of this, the “box” for the station and communications accounted for approximately 140 million rubles, the rest - for equipment. Representatives of SSK at the end of December brought part of the filtration machines and presented us with an invoice for 216 million rubles. We refused to pay it,” said Mr. Kostikov. According to him, employees of the capital construction department did not see sets of Belarusian equipment included in the contract in original packaging and with technical certificates, but some “disassembled items.” “For example, the cleaning containers were not filled with a special substance, but were simply barrels,” explained Sergei Kostikov. According to him, the objections of the municipalities did not meet with support “before the change of power” - on February 26, Vadim Potomsky was appointed acting head of the region, whose team “understood the situation.” However, the refusal to pay for Chinese equipment by that time had already resulted in the return of unspent 270 million rubles to the federal budget, which now “seems to be given to Orel again.” Mr. Potomsky, indeed, already announced in mid-March that he would transfer materials related to the construction of the facility to the security forces. Then, in a conversation with Kommersant, he called this story one of the circumstances that influenced his decision to fire Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Parakhin. The latter was one of the curators of preparations for the celebration of the 450th anniversary of the Eagle in 2016. The station was built within the framework of this program.

Mr. Parakhin sharply refused to comment on the situation and accused Kommersant of “slandering” him.

Meanwhile, the municipalities are trying to break the agreement with SSK. The head of the city, Sergei Stupin, told Kommersant that he had already submitted a claim to arbitration to declare the contract void. “They did not fulfill their obligations. This is the consolidated position of the mayor’s office, the city council and the regional government,” he said.

The SSK itself previously denied the accusations. Company representative Oleg Rybin, at a meeting with local media, insisted that the law allows the contractor to purchase equipment equivalent to that specified in the contract. In addition, Mr. Rybin claimed that only some of the devices were made in China, and the rest “meeted European standards.” According to him, the company even “went over budget by 1.5%” because it “transported the equipment quickly.” The SSK said that they could not buy already assembled sets of Belarusian units, comparing them with “a pig in a poke worth almost 300 million rubles.” Yesterday it was impossible to contact Oleg Rybin.

Vsevolod Inyutin, Voronezh

They tried to purify the water from millions