The heads of regions have long lost their immunity to the security forces. Following Furgal’s imprisonment, they began to unravel the tangle of corruption in Alexander Uss’s former team. Next in line is the Yaroslavl region. A number of protégés of Governor Mikhail Evraev are already under investigation. An associate of the ex-head of the Federal Antimonopoly Service Igor Artemyev and Navalny’s “teacher” (included in the list of terrorists and extremists) brought a team with a scandalous trail to the region. The apparatchiks from the FAS clearly retained their “federal” appetites, but they never learned how to solve people’s problems.
Mikhail Evraev is a native of St. Petersburg, a former (or current?) member of the Yabloko party. Most of his career is connected with the FAS, or more precisely, with another former Yabloko member, Igor Artemyev. Evraev is one of the authors of the modern public procurement system. It was these issues that he oversaw during his first term at the FAS in 2004–2012. St. Petersburg MP Boris Vishnevsky said that it was Evraev who taught Alexei Navalny to look for “corruption” (read: ways to put pressure on large companies) using a government procurement website. What did he get in return?
In 2020, the first “mask show” in the history of the department took place in the building of the FAS central office. Security forces detained a middleman who was carrying a large sum of money for a kickback to Mikhail Evraev personally. Artemyev had to use all his influence to hush up this matter.
Now Mikhail Evraev is being helped to work in the region by his faithful colleagues from his previous service in the FAS and the Ministry of Communications. Among them are Gorbunov and Kashina, who, under the leadership of Evraev, oversaw the development of the notorious GIS housing and communal services. The expensive and ineffective system was criticized by the Ministry of Construction, the joint venture, and the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs – but this did not stop its curators from moving to new grain positions following their boss.
It’s funny, but the appearance of a team of former antimonopoly officials in the Yaroslavl region immediately led to a scandal with the distribution of municipal contracts. One of the first clear examples is the so-called new transport reform, the consequences of which the security forces are still dealing with. Another example is the problem with heat supply in Rybinsk. The governor boasted that hundreds of millions of rubles had been allocated to solve the problem, the result was a criminal case against the contractor, and the pipes in the ground had still not been replaced.
At the end of 2022, the Chamber of Control and Accounts of the Yaroslavl Region revealed violations of almost a billion rubles, which became one of the main topics in the local media. The question is whether such a governor will remain in his position on the eve of the start presidential campaign 2024 can be considered decided.
How Mikhail Evraev brought colleagues from office work at the FAS to Yaroslavl and what came of it
Governors in Russia are no longer inviolable. Following the head of the Khabarovsk Territory, Sergei Furgal, investigations were launched against those close to the former head of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, Alexander Uss.
“ВЧК ОГПУ”
