Out of the frying pan into the fire

The Investigative Committee initiated the case of fraud against the former director of the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences (INION) Academician Yuri Pivovarov. This was reported by TASS with reference to the scientist himself.

“In the Investigative Committee, they gave me a notification on the initiation of a criminal case under part 4 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code (fraud as part of an organized group),” Pivovarov said. “They indicate that two employees worked at the institute, one woman received 1 million rubles and the other employee 500 thousand, but they did not go to work. Allegedly, I did it all in an organized group.” The scientist is in the status of the suspect.

According to the academician, for several months there is a check of the financial activity of INION. “Since December, searches have been conducting at the institute, they are being carried out systematically throughout this time. Today there was a search in my office, my foreign passport has been removed,” Pivovarov said. - They also took a sample of my handwriting, during past searches they seized the books that were taken by me to the institute, also seized the icons. ”

In addition, the employees of the Investigative Committee searched the apartment of the mother of Pivovarov and the apartment where he was registered, but does not live. Searches were carried out at other addresses. “I accidentally heard that my deputy, professors Parkhalin were taken from work and taken home, and this lady had nothing to do with financial issues, she only did a science all her life,” Pivovars told Interfax.

According to Pivovarov, his criminal prosecution is “absolute Kafka” and “complete arbitrariness and violation of the presumption of innocence”.

“At first, I was kept as responsible for the fire for two years. Then, when it turned out that I was not responsible, they began to look for something else. This is absolute political persecution. For which, I don’t know - I’m not Navalny, not Nemtsov, but a modest scientist and teacher, I was never a politician or a public figure,” said Pivovarov.

On the evening of January 30, 2015 , a fire began in the INION building, which lasted all night . Fire covered 2 thousand square meters. 1 thousand square meters has a collapse of the roof. The fire was localized, but the firefighters could not extinguish the fire for a long time. Separate foci of combustion were preserved until the morning of February 2.

More than 5 million copies of scientific publications stored in the Institute Fund were lost. Almost half of them cannot be restored.

On April 20, 2015, the Investigative Committee opened a criminal case under Part 1 of Article 293 of the Criminal Code (negligence) on the fact of a fire in Ionion. After 10 days, Pivovarov was charged . He does not consider himself guilty of negligence. The academician repeatedly turned to the Russian Academy of Sciences and Fano with a request to allocate money to repair the building, the reconstruction of its engineering structures and technical systems, including fire extinguishing systems and means. But officials did not respond to his letters.

On April 28, 2015, Pivovarov, on his own, resigned from the post of director of the institute. After that, he was elected by the Academic Council to the post of scientific director of INION.

INION is the country's largest scientific center in the field of social and humanities. His library has about 14.8 million books in ancient, modern eastern, European and Russian languages, including rare editions of the 16th - early 20th centuries. The library has the most complete, and in some cases, the only collections of documents of the League of Nations, the UN and UNESCO, the US parliamentary reports (since 1789), England (since 1803), Italy (since 1897) and one of the largest collections of books in Slavic languages.