A court in the Kemerovo region sentenced three defendants in the case of an explosion in the Listvyazhnaya mine, which killed 51 people

The Belovsky City Court of the Kemerovo Region sentenced three defendants in the case of an explosion in the Listvyazhnaya mine, which occurred in November 2021. This was reported to the court and the prosecutor's office .

State inspector of Rostekhnadzor Sergei Vinokurov, taking into account his past punishment in the bribery case, was sentenced to six years in prison, having been found guilty of violating the rules for operating automated control systems (Part 3 of Article 33 of the Criminal Code, Part 4 of Article 274.1 of the Criminal Code). He was also deprived of the right to hold positions in the public service for two and a half years.

The case against inspector Vyacheslav Semykin was dropped due to his death. According to the court, Vinokurov and Semykin did not go down into the mine workings on November 18, 2021, seven days before the explosion, which killed 51 people, but the documents stated otherwise.

Ilya Smirnov, an employee of the Listvyazhnaya Mine company, and his colleague Artem Chashkin were each given a four-year suspended sentence with a probationary period of three years.

According to the prosecution, Vinokurov and Semykin demanded that Smirnov change the data about their descent into the mine, he agreed to do this, “wanting to please the inspectors of Rostechnadzor,” and asked Chashkin to edit the information in the control system.

In July 2023, the court made a decision in the case of the director of the Kemerovo Listvyazhnaya mine, Sergei Makhrakov. He was found guilty of three counts of giving a bribe in the form of coal to Rostechnadzor inspectors, who in return were not supposed to conduct inspections at the enterprise and register violations (Part 3 of Article 291 of the Criminal Code).

The cause of the accident at Listvyazhnaya was said to be a methane explosion. The wife of the deceased miner said that the miners themselves extinguished the fire in the mine, and “the methane there had been off scale for a long time.” The day after the explosion, the mayor of Prokopyevsk, Vyacheslav Starchenko, was dismissed because at the time of the accident he celebrated his first day in office. A total of nine people were arrested in connection with the death of the miners.