Arrest of the mayor, cases against deputies and officials. Courts continue to pass sentences after the flood in Irkutsk Tulun in 2019

In the Irkutsk region, a court sentenced an official from the city of Tulun, Maria Mironova, who was found guilty of fraud in the distribution of housing among local residents affected by the flood in 2019. Many city officials, including the mayor of Tulun, were drawn into such fraud. Some of them have already received sentences; the cases against others continue to be investigated.

As the press service of the Irkutsk Department of the Investigative Committee reported on October 3, the chief specialist of the housing department of the Committee for Municipal Property Management of the Tulun City District Administration was sentenced to two years probation. The ICR message does not mention the name of the convicted person; People of Baikal write that the official’s name is Maria Mironova. The publication also notes that this is the mildest sentence so far in cases of housing fraud in flood-stricken Tulun.

Mironova was found guilty under the article of fraud committed by a group of persons by prior conspiracy on an especially large scale (Part 4 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). According to the prosecution, in January - March 2020, “the defendant, together with an official of the Tulun city administration and another person, by submitting false documents to the court, registered housing for the mother of her partner, lost as a result of the flood.” Subsequently, this woman illegally received an apartment in the Irkutsk region worth more than 1.7 million rubles to replace the “lost” housing, which she never had.

Mironova admitted guilt, entered into a pre-trial agreement and partially compensated for the damage caused.

Flood

Tulun is a regional center with a population of less than 40 thousand people, located approximately 400 km northwest of Irkutsk. The Tulunsky district was particularly hard hit by the flooding that occurred in the Irkutsk region in the summer of 2019. Then 26 people died in the region.

At the end of June 2019, the water in the Oya River rose to a record level of 13.5 m and broke through the dams. As a result, Tulun was flooded and its residents were evacuated. The water left only a month later, at the end of July. Thousands of houses were destroyed or flooded. The state of emergency declared then in Tulun was lifted only in January 2024.

Vladimir Putin himself visited the regional center twice. The first time this happened was in July: he met with residents of Tulun at a temporary accommodation point and promised them new houses and housing certificates. Putin came for the second time in early September of the same year. Even during his first visit, the head of state called the work to eliminate the consequences of the flood unsatisfactory.

Resignations and criminal cases

A few months after Putin’s words, in December 2019, the head of the Irkutsk region Sergei Levchenko (KPRF) was dismissed . Even earlier, the head of the Nizhneudinsky district, which was also heavily damaged by the flood, Sergei Khudonogov, lost his position: his resignation was demanded by the Russian government after the publication of a video on social networks indicating that emergency services were priority eliminating the consequences of the flood in the Khudonogov area.

The head of the district was expelled from United Russia, the Investigative Committee opened a criminal case against Khudonogov under the article on abuse of official powers (Part 2 of Article 285 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). It was not possible to find information about the further consideration of this case in open sources.

In October 2023, the mayor of Tulun, Yuri Karikh, was arrested; he spent time in a pre-trial detention center until August 2024, when he was released under a ban on certain actions. In the same year, Karikh was removed from his post as head of the city through the court. The ex-mayor was sentenced only in August 2025. Karikh was found guilty on three counts - negligence (Part 1 of Article 293 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), abuse of power (Part 2 of Article 286 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) and embezzlement (Part 3 of Article 160 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) - and was sentenced to five years in a general regime colony.