Entrepreneur Yevgeny Gorbachev, by decision of the Gagarinsky District Court of Moscow dated August 29, 2022, had his sentence of house arrest reduced. The court did not consider the investigation’s arguments convincing that Gorbachev could hide or obstruct the investigation of the criminal case. It was also taken into account that Gorbachev had no previous convictions and had a number of state awards.
However, the easing of the preventive measure for Gorbachev does not yet mean the triumph of justice. After all, the criminal case in which he was taken into custody, as they say, belongs to the category of ambiguous. The Spetsstroy-1 company, where Yevgeny Gorbachev worked, handed over military facilities at Cape Schmidt and Wrangel Island to the Ministry of Defense in 2016. The work acceptance documentation was in perfect order. However, the customer (Federal State Unitary Enterprise GVSU No. 14) filed a claim against Spetsstroy-1 LLC to recover the amount of the unpaid advance in the amount of 1,077,000,000 rubles and a penalty in the amount of 5,811,565,456 rubles.
Meanwhile, a criminal case was opened against Yevgeny Gorbachev under Article 159. He is charged with theft on an especially large scale. Without going into the legal subtleties, the point of the accusation is that funds from the state order were stolen, and the work paid for from the state budget was not completed. However, the above court decisions refute this version of the investigation. The objects were handed over, the necessary documentation was signed. The Resolution of the Moscow District Arbitration Court dated February 5, 2021 noted: “The contractor accepted the work actually completed at the site, signed acts of hidden work, all the as-built documentation for the scope of work actually completed by SpetsStroy-1 LLC, accepted the equipment without comments…”
However, the investigation does not seem to be impressed by the court decisions. A criminal case lives its own separate life. It seems that in Russia there are two alternative cubes of entrepreneurs. The “Major League”, with real estate and assets abroad, connections in government and the transfer of money to offshore areas, has been combined into a “sanctions list”. And businessmen who do not have assets abroad, who build important defense, industrial, agricultural clusters, work for the benefit of the Russian economy and its prosperity, come under the radar of law enforcement agencies and become defendants in Article 159 of the Criminal Code: fraud.
“ВЧК ОГПУ”
