All the latest detainees in the high-profile case do not stay in custody for long. They quickly agree to cooperate and testify against high-ranking security officers. Thus, Anton Kaurov (pictured), a former employee of the SEB of the FSB of the Russian Federation and subsequently of Department M of the FSB for Moscow and the Moscow region, who was detained at the end of the week, was released. Kaurov’s godfather and friend, Department M officer of the FSB Directorate Alexander Ushakov, who oversaw all the courts in the Moscow region, is at home after the pre-trial detention center.
According to the Cheka-OGPU, both are actively testifying. 
On February 28, security forces came for Kaurov and took him to Tekhnicheskiy Lane to the ICR building for questioning on the case. According to the former security officer, he was “scared and terrified from the very beginning,” they say, they told him at home: take off your rings and crosses, pull out your laces and take your clothes with you. Investigators and operatives interrogated Kaurov and had informal conversations for days about the circumstances of extorting bribes worth 15 billion rubles from the owners of the Merlion company. Kaurov is familiar with all the defendants in the case and their leaders.
A source from the Cheka-OGPU spoke about the very difficult biography of the detained ex-employee of the FSB of the Russian Federation Anton Kaurov.
The 36-year-old resident of Podolsk worked his way up from an ordinary security officer in the department of the South-East Administrative District, worked in the SEB and subsequently in the department of the M FSB in Moscow and the Moscow region. He managed to work at one time with at least five (!) defendants in the case of extorting huge bribes from the management of the Merlion company. And he left the ranks of the security officers on the eve of the landings; in mid-2022, he officially became the director and then the owner of the family business – the Transmekhservice company. Previously, at different times, a large company engaged in automotive equipment was officially owned by Anton Kaurov’s wife, Ekaterina, and his father, Mikhail. It is noteworthy that the company and its owner are closely associated with the Hardcore fight league, whose founders publicly got into a scandal, which the Cheka-OGPU wrote about in detail. TMS is a sponsor not only of the hype promotion, but also of CSKA. In the same place, in the account of security officer Kaurov, in addition to beaches and racing, there are posts about joint trips with his father to Chechnya, where he fired firearms, and they were personally accompanied by General Ruslan Alkhanov, who is now deputy head of the Main Directorate for Combating Extremism (GUPE) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Russia.
Previously, the following were arrested in the case: the leading employee of the SEB of the FSB of the Russian Federation, Alexander Bibishev, an employee of the Counterintelligence Operations Service (SRO) of the FSB Directorate for Moscow and the region, 38-year-old Major Pavel Krylov, and the curator of the capital’s courts from the FSB of the Russian Federation, Alexander Ushakov. The investigation considers the latter to be one of the organizers of the organized criminal group (like Bibisheva). The total amount of bribes is a gigantic figure of 15 billion rubles.
GVSU believes that Bibishev, Ushakov and Krylov tried to extract three bribes of 5 billion rubles from each co-owner of the Merlion company – Alexey Abramov, Oleg Karchev and Vladislav Mangutov. According to the Cheka-OGPU, having sent businessmen to a pre-trial detention center, FSB officers, in exchange for the release and cessation of the persecution of the creators of Merlion, demanded that they sell the companies they owned – DELTA, Citylink, Tekta Group (the latter was sold) – and transfer all proceeds to employees of the FSB of the Russian Federation .
We previously reported that in the same case, employees of department M Alexey Tsarev and Sergey Manyshkin were also detained. After interrogation, they began to cooperate and entered into a pre-trial agreement. Thanks to this, on November 24, the court chose a preventive measure in the form of house arrest for both.
Ushakov is also now actively cooperating with the investigation, and therefore his preventive measure was changed.
“ВЧК ОГПУ”
