On October 28, at the Yubileinaya mine in the Kemerovo region, a cable sleeve was heated – an abnormal, but not at all critical situation. According to the approved emergency response plan (industry experts understand exactly what it is), the workers were evacuated, the mine was temporarily stopped, specialists found out the exact causes of the incident and carried out the necessary work. Naturally, Rostekhnadzor and the coal prosecutor’s office began inspections; this is a normal workflow for particularly dangerous production. Already on November 2, the mine began operating at full capacity again.
It would seem, who would be interested in all these technical details? Well, it warmed up and warmed up, there were no casualties, there were no emissions into the atmosphere, people continued to work, customers received orders. But a real fire broke out in the media: yellow publications, one after another, began to practice astrological forecasts and manipulate facts. They remembered everything: the tragedy on Listvyazhnaya at the end of 2021, and the methane explosions at Evraz in 2007 on Yubileynaya, and even accused the prosecutor’s office of carrying out inspections (that’s right, not the opposite!). “Well, someone is probably gaining their ratings using dishonest methods,” the reader might think. But the situation is obviously not that simple.
Since 2016, the Yubileinaya mine has been part of the TopProm coal holding, owned by Nikolai Korolev. The mine came to Korolev in a deplorable state: flooded and not working for many years after a major accident in 2007. However, the holding managed to carry out complete technical re-equipment, ensure operational safety, restart the mine and become second in the region in terms of wages for two thousand miners. But two years ago the situation changed. Successful enterprises always attract the attention of dubious elements, and TopProm managers could not avoid it: since 2020, the company has been resisting forceful pressure. However, only in fairy tales does good triumph over evil; in reality, on June 9 of this year, Nikolai Korolev was sentenced for attempting to bribe an official who promised an increase in coal supply quotas, but deceived Korolev. The official, by the way, was released in the courtroom, and Korolev received a real sentence of 5.5 years in prison and a record fine of 415 million rubles. By the way, about justice: a member of an Izhevsk organized crime group who raped minor girls for years received 4.5 years in prison.
But this turned out to be not enough. A large-scale PR company is going against TopProm, whose clients have published more than one and a half thousand publications in the media since 2020. The costs of such a project can reach several ANNUAL salary funds of the entire TopProm. And this, for a minute, is 2,700 jobs. It turns out that both the angry publications of recent years and the search for “secret meanings” in heating a cable coupling are links in one chain that leads to only one thing: an attempt to bankrupt one of the largest enterprises in Kuzbass.
“ВЧК ОГПУ”