Where have they been for 8 years?

Why was Tarantino arrested? Ex-CEO of Aeroflot Poluboyarinov sent to pre-trial detention center

The Tverskoy District Court of Moscow granted the investigation's request and sent Mikhail Poluboyarinov, the former general director of Aeroflot, whom his colleagues and friends call "Tarantino" behind his back, under arrest for two months. Because of the resemblance to the iconic American director.

Information about the selection of a preventive measure against Mikhail Poluboyarinov did not appear on the Moscow City Court website. Meanwhile, journalists from several publications found out that Poluboyarinov was charged with Part 3 of Art. 285 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (abuse of official powers).

Mikhail Poluboyarinov is 60 years old. In 2000, at the age of 34, he got a job at Aeroflot as a chief accountant. In 2003, he became the airline's deputy general director for finance and planning. In 2009, he moved to Vnesheconombank, taking the position of Director of the Infrastructure Department. Two years later, in 2011, he became deputy chairman of the board of the state bank. On November 20, 2020, Poluboyarinov returned to Aeroflot as CEO of the state airline. And he left this position shortly after the start of the special military operation, on April 8, 2022.

A month and a half after his dismissal from Aeroflot, Poluboyarinov gave an interview to Forbes magazine, in which he stated that he was not going to go into private business. They say he better understands business related to government agencies, because he has more skills in such matters. This interview was more like a presentation by a manager: yes, I resigned, but I remain in Russia and am waiting for job offers.

- I will try to do well what I understand, know and can do. In the same VEB, this is also a business, loans that had to be repaid and that had to give a return. This is also a business. But more structured,” Poluboyarinov said in an interview with Forbes magazine.

But, despite his enormous managerial experience, Mikhail Poluboyarinov was never offered any significant positions. Recently he worked at Rostec, in an inconspicuous, insignificant position.

Law enforcement agencies have no complaints about Poluboyarinov’s work at Aeroflot. But serious questions arose regarding the period of his work at Vnesheconombank, which in those years was transformed into the state corporation VEB.RF. And the answers to these questions can lead to up to 10 years in prison. This is exactly what the sanction of Part 3 of Art. 285 of the Criminal Code of Russia.

Operatives and investigators became very interested in the role of Mikhail Poluboyarinov in the fate of hundreds of billions of rubles allocated for the rehabilitation of Svyaz-Bank and Globex Bank, which Vnesheconombank was entrusted with carrying out and which Poluboyarinov supervised.

Let me remind you that Poluboyarinov came to Vnesheconombank in 2009. And a year before that, in 2008, VEB took over the Globex and Svyaz-Bank banks, which found themselves in a pre-bankruptcy state, but a political decision was made to preserve these credit institutions. And it was Poluboyarinov who spent almost ten years rescuing these banks. But he didn’t save me. Rather, on the contrary, the financial funnel into which the banks found themselves somehow expanded.

In 2018, the badly battered banks were merged. And in January 2020, VEB transferred the consolidated financial business to Promsvyazbank. And this despite the fact that the Central Bank of Russia allocated 212.6 billion rubles for the rehabilitation of Globex and Svyaz-Bank. Initially in the form of deposits from the Central Bank, but in 2014 these deposit billions were converted into VEB bonds.

If the team led by Poluboyarinov had done nothing at all to save Globex and Svyaz-Bank, then, as experts suggest, the state could have lost significantly less money.

Here, for example, is the very bad story of the acquisition of the Tolyatti National Trade Bank (NTB OJSC). In 2009, the chairman of the board of NTB, Vitaly Vavilin, was appointed chairman of the board of Globex Bank, which was already in the process of reorganization. Having settled into his new workplace, Vavilin, apparently, could convince Poluboyarinov to buy NTB. And in December 2010, he authorized this purchase.

The deal was completed without a serious analysis of the balance sheet of OJSC NTB. Later, it turned out that the volume of bad assets (that is, assets whose fair/real value is significantly lower than their nominal/stated value) at the time of acquisition exceeded 20 billion rubles.

OJSC NTB, pursuing a high-risk credit policy, issued, as follows from the materials of the criminal case, loans against collateral that did not cover 50% of the issued funds. Using cunning schemes, these loans were transferred to closed-end mutual funds created in advance. NTB itself was the 100% shareholder of the mutual funds.

In turn, shares of these funds were listed on the NTB balance sheet. At the same time, the funds themselves, thanks to a management company controlled by NTB managers, hid the real value of their net assets.

In general, the National Trade Bank skillfully camouflaged the real state of affairs. But the professionals from the VEB team simply had to conduct a meticulous audit and reveal all these skeletons of NTB even before its purchase.

Mikhail Poluboyarinov’s team did nothing of this. As a result, in 2011, 3.5 billion rubles were allocated for the repurchase of NTB shares. At the exchange rate of that time, this is about 122 million US dollars.

Next. While Vnesheconombank specialists under the leadership of Poluboyarinov were sanitizing Globex, this bank became a major player in the cash-out market. Only from the fourth quarter of 2015 to the first quarter of 2018, the volume of cash transactions of the bank, according to the investigation, amounted to 36.4 billion rubles, 595 legal entities were included in the transactions. The main cashers were Globex branches in St. Petersburg and Tolyatti.

It was during this period that another manager, Artem Dovlatov, stepped up to help Mikhail Poluboyarinov. At the beginning of the 2000s, when Boyarinov worked as the chief accountant of Aeroflot, Dovlatov also worked for the same airline, holding a position whose name was difficult to fit on his business card: deputy head of the investment analysis and design department of the joint stock property department of Aeroflot - Russian Airlines.

In 2016, friends from Aeroflot times met at Vnesheconombank. Dovlatov was hired as an adviser to the chairman of the bank's board. And already in March 2017, he was appointed deputy chairman of Vnesheconombank. And they began to work, as they say, with four hands. Somehow, without particularly noticing the muddy schemata in the same Globex.

As a result, at the beginning of the second quarter of 2017, Globex’s balance sheet had problem loans amounting to 86.2 billion rubles.

Here are specific examples.

Without any collateral, almost on the word of honor of bankster Georgy Bedzhamov, a loan of 3.2 billion rubles was issued to Bedzhamov’s Vneshprombank.

The companies TechnoServ AS LLC and Technoserv Management LLC, whose beneficiaries were the notorious bankster Alexey Ananyev and his wife Lyudmila, received a loan in the amount of 12 million US dollars, which, apparently, they did not even think about repaying.

JSC Volgomost received 2.9 billion rubles against illiquid collateral that did not cover the amount issued.

Also, Mordovcement PJSC and Nevyansky Cementnik JSC received 3.9 billion rubles as security that did not cover the amount issued.

And Globex issued tens of billions of such loans. And this happened at the same period when the VEB team, supervised by Mikhail Poluboyarinov, and helped by Artem Dovlatov, seemed to be tirelessly working on improving the financial position of the bank.

On May 24, 2018, by decree of the President of Russia, Igor Shuvalov was appointed chairman of Vnesheconombank. It was under Shuvalov that Vnesheconombank was transformed into the state development corporation VEB.RF. And it was in 2018 that the murky schemes that took place during the period of Globex’s recovery were revealed. The new management initiated a criminal case of particularly large embezzlement at Globex Bank, initiated by the Investigative Committee of Russia on November 13, 2018.

Poluboyarinov and Dovlatov then escaped with a slight fright, and on November 14, 2018, only the chairman of the board of Globex, the former chairman of the board of the Togliatti National Trade Bank, Vitaly Vavilin, was arrested. But he was treated humanely. Vavilin spent 15 months in a prison cell. On February 20, 2020, he was transferred to house arrest.

When the case was brought to court, the prosecution demanded that Vavilin be sentenced to 8 years in prison under Part 4 of Art. 160 of the Criminal Code (embezzlement on an especially large scale). But the court reclassified the waste as abuse of power. This is Article 201 of the Criminal Code. And he sentenced the banker to a completely vegetarian 3 years in a general regime colony. And the Moscow City Court, in the appellate instance, knocked off three months for Vavilin and released him completely, calculating that while in a pre-trial detention center and then under house arrest, the accused had already fully served his sentence.

It would seem that the history of murky schemes during the rehabilitation of Globex and Svyaz-Bank is over. And it ended with zilch. But that was not the case. The trace that Poluboyarinov and Dovlatov left in this history, it seems, turned out to be so deep that it was not covered by archival dust.

First they came for Artem Dovlatov. On April 27, 2026, in the Investigative Unit of the Main Directorate for Moscow, a criminal case was opened against Dovlatov under Part 3 of Art. 285 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (abuse of official powers, resulting in grave consequences). On April 30, the Tverskoy Court of Moscow sent Dovlatov under house arrest. On June 24, house arrest was extended for another two months, until August.

Well, since Artem Dovlatov, as I already said, during the period of Globex’s recovery, worked in close tandem and under the direct supervision of Mikhail Poluboyarinov, Poluboyarinov also had to be taken into custody.

The question inevitably arises: why did this happen only now: when more than eight years have passed since the events that the investigation considers criminal?

I don't yet have a comprehensive answer to this question. Perhaps the evidence was weak. Or perhaps only now political weakening has overtaken the patrons of Dovlatov and Poluboyarinov. And they were no longer able to protect their protégés from criminal prosecution.