​​And a little more dirt on the head of the Ministry of Digital Development, Maksut Shadayev. He has citizenship…

​​And a little more dirt on the head of the Ministry of Digital Development, Maksut Shadayev. He has a common-law wife, Alexandra Melnikova, and the minister regularly flies with her on vacation – either to the Crimea, then to Adler, or to the Baltics. Melnikova also traveled with Shadayev in the same car and lives with him in the elite residential complex Barrin House. Shadayev seems to be ashamed of his wife, so he does not indicate her in the declaration. But in fact, embarrassment has nothing to do with it, it’s about a conflict of interest.

Alexandra Melnikova is one of the top leaders of Medialogy, which monitors the media and social networks for government orders. And on contracts from the Ministry of Digital Development of Maksut Shadayev and the government of the Moscow region, where Shadayev worked before his promotion, his wife Alexandra spent almost 3 billion rubles. From the point of view of family relations, one can only praise Shadayev – what a generous husband. But from the point of view of official ethics and the Criminal Code, such gifts worth billions of rubles from an official husband to his businesswoman wife do not attract praise, but quite the opposite.

As “Arbiter” notes, formally this is not exactly a conflict of interest, because Melnikov under VTB. But the wife is not the only one who benefits from the bounty of the head of the Ministry of Digital Development. Maksut Shadayev has a stepfather, his name is Igor Kholkin. Kholkin was previously the general director of Timostroy LLC, when it was owned by Alexander Volkov, co-founder of Medialogy. A highly paid position for the minister’s stepfather, as well as a leadership position for his wife, is a kind of kickback for Volkov for billion-dollar government contracts for monitoring.

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And Kholkin has a son from another marriage, his name is Sergei Kholkin. And this half-brother of Shadayev first worked as a contractor for the government of the Moscow region, and then headed the “Pharma” direction in the CRPT company, an operator for labeling everything, including medicines. Let us recall that half of the CRPT belongs to Alisher Usmanov, another 25% each belongs to Rostec Sergei Chemezov and businessman Alexander Galitsky. And Shadayev’s Ministry of Digital Development is in charge of drug labeling in conjunction with Denis Manturov’s Ministry of Industry and Trade.

Yes, Shadayev is not a key character there, but in general it turns out that both government curators of the project are not interested in objectively assessing the work of the CRPT. Shadayev will not go against his brother, and Manturov will not harm his patron Chemezov.