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On March 15, the FSB opened a criminal case against “certain senior officials of the Ministry of Culture and a number of entrepreneurs” who are suspected of embezzling public funds allocated for restoration work

Deputy Minister of Culture Grigory Pirumov is suspected of creating a criminal group. According to investigators, it included Boris Mazo, Director of the Property Management and Investment Policy Department of the Ministry of Culture, Oleg Ivanov, Director of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise Tsentrrestavratsiya, Dmitry Sergeev, director of the BaltStroy company, and Alexander Kochenov, manager of the same company. At the same time, in St. Petersburg, searches are being carried out at the HC Forum, at home and at the dacha of the director of the company, Dmitry Mikhalchenko.

The reason for such a serious case, the FSB calls the state contract for 130 million rubles for the restoration of the Novodevichy Convent in Moscow, which the Ministry of Culture concluded with StroyFasad CJSC. According to investigators, the price was overstated by 50 million rubles. However, this government contract is just the tip of the iceberg. wrote about the details not so long ago The New Times (see NT of No. 42 of December 14, 2015).

The investigation of the magazine began with a government contract for three wine cabinets and the testimony of Yulia Pasova, the ex-wife of Stanislav Kuner, a friend of Sergeyev and Mikhalchenko, who returned to the company from the position of chairman of the ATEKS tender commission, subordinate to the Federal Security Service (FSO) and personally to the director of the service, General of the Army Evgeny Murov. During the divorce process, Pasova learned that the Kuner-Sergeev connection was not limited to a joint holiday in the Maldives. Friends, once co-owners of small St. Petersburg firms Tekhnoflot, TFDecor, Petrodecor, continue their joint business: one places “delicious” government orders, the other wins them.

Stroykomplekt LLC, which took contracts for the Lenin Mausoleum and the Triumphal Arch on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, is half owned by the arrested Dmitry Sergeev

The Admiralty, the Cinizelli Circus in St. Petersburg, the walls and towers of the Moscow Kremlin, the Palace of Facets, the Izborsk Museum-Reserve, the Resurrection Monastery in New Jerusalem - BaltStroy JSC restores all the most iconic objects of Russian culture. StroyKomplekt LLC, which took contracts for the Lenin Mausoleum and the Triumphal Arch on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, is half owned by the arrested Dmitry Sergeev. The total number of contracts goes not to millions, but to billions of rubles. Quality? In June 2015, a fire broke out in the Moscow Conservatory; in November, a brick arch collapsed in the basement of the conservatory in Sredny Kislovsky Lane, killing a person. A year ago, the bell tower of the Novodevichy Convent burned down - this was the last straw of patience of the Federal Security Service.

But here's the thing: Director of the FSO Yevgeny Murov is a colleague of Nikolai Negodov, a retired major general of the FSB, who, in turn, attracted Dmitry Mikhalchenko "in business" in the 1990s. Mikhalchenko is the godfather of the son of Andrei Kaminov, director of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise Ateks of the Federal Security Service. Murov's resignation was inevitable due to age - in November last year he turned 70 years old. But no one expected that the "trigger" mechanism of criminal cases would work before the official farewell: in the country's most powerful and most closed special service, sudden movements are not held in high esteem. What triggered it is not yet known. Perhaps - a typical work of "BaltStroy" in the presidential residence "Novo-Ogaryovo". But NT will talk about this in one of the next issues.