The Ministry of Culture reported to the FSB on the expenses of the “Seventh Studio” a year before the arrests of the defendants

The FSB has been checking the expenditure of budget funds allocated by the Ministry of Culture to the Seventh Studio since at least March 2016, RBC reports , citing a letter from the ministry to the FSB. The press service of the Ministry of Culture confirmed the authenticity of the letter to the publication.

The Seventh Studio case was officially opened on May 19, 2017. At the same time, on April 8, 2016, the head of the department of state support for art and folk art of the Ministry of Culture, Andrei Malyshev, wrote a letter to the deputy head of the department of the Service for the Protection of the Constitutional System of the FSB, Nikolai Mikhailov.

This document, RBC writes, stated that the ministry was sending the secret service copies of three agreements on providing subsidies to the Seventh Studio, as well as “reports on actual expenses, creative reports and primary documents.” Attached to this letter were documents on 821 pages. The department's press service confirmed that they had indeed sent such a letter to the FSB, its originating number and contents were correct.

The Ministry of Culture is recognized as the injured party in the Seventh Studio case. The accused are the artistic director of the Gogol Center Kirill Serebrennikov, the former general director of the Gogol Center Alexey Malobrodsky, the ex-director of the Seventh Studio Yuri Itin and the director of RAMT Sofya Apfelbaum. Malobrodsky is in pre-trial detention until July 19, the rest of the defendants in the case are under house arrest for the same period.

They are accused of stealing 133 million rubles of budget funds allocated for the implementation of the Platform project to popularize theatrical art. The Ministry of Culture filed a civil claim for this amount.

Initially, the case also involved the former chief accountant of the Seventh Studio, Nina Maslyaeva, and the producer of the Seventh Studio, Ekaterina Voronova. However, Maslyaeva admitted guilt and testified against other defendants in the case, after which her case was separated into separate proceedings. Voronova’s case has also been separated into separate proceedings. The producer was arrested in absentia after she left Russia.