The trial of Zakharchenko: “the less you say, the shorter the sentence” April 6, Presnensky District …

The trial of Zakharchenko: “the less you say, the shorter the sentence”

On April 6, the Presnensky District Court of Moscow continued to consider the case of ex-Colonel Dmitry Zakharchenko. The investigation believes that he received billions in bribes for general patronage from the largest contractor of Russian Railways – GK 1520. Details in the report of the VChK-OGPU correspondent.

The ex-co-owner of GC “1520” Valery Markelov, who is involved in the Zakharchenko case, obviously “gives up”: last time his defense was forced to call doctors to examine him directly into the courtroom (judge Sergei Artemov authorized this subject to the simultaneous calling of an ordinary ambulance) , however, the bailiffs did not allow the doctors brought by the lawyers into the building. At today’s meeting, Valery Markelov looked even more haggard and thinner, and the guard had to call an ambulance so that Markelov was given a painkiller injection right before the start of the trial so that he could take part in it.

Advertisement

Witness Ivan Anokhin, the current head of the 18th tax inspectorate in Moscow, said that he knows Zakharchenko “from work.” According to him, Zakharchenko and his people represented the Ministry of Internal Affairs during tax audits, while the positions of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and tax officials at times did not coincide. Anokhin said that there were no agreements between them, but “we were all interested in achieving certain indicators, so we shared our positions and tried to find common ground.” According to Anokhin, no one ever put pressure on him or specifically asked for anything, and Zakharchenko was only interested in the prospects for specific checks from the point of view of collecting money in favor of the state.

Olga Zalutskaya, an ex-tax official and ex-colleague of Anokhin, said that she knows Zakharchenko (she heard about the other defendants in his case, like Anokhin, only from the media) “due to work circumstances.” She discussed with him potential joint tax audits of Russian Railways structures (Zalutskaya separately noted that the conversations were not private, but open, through secretaries), but Zalutskaya refused him due to the fact that cooperation between the Ministry of Internal Affairs and tax authorities would greatly complicate the audit process. To the undisguised irritation of state prosecutor Milana Digaeva, Zalutskaya said that Zakharchenko knew the verification procedure very well and did not ask for anything illegal. Zakharchenko himself confirmed the veracity of the testimony of both Zalutskaya and Anokhin.

Svetlana Chernaya, whom the state prosecution had already called before (the Cheka-OGPU wrote about this here https://t.me/vchkogpu/19080), completed a series of witness statements from Milana Digaeva. The state prosecution justified Chernaya’s repeated summons to court despite Zakharchenko’s objection with new circumstances. They turned out to be that when Chernaya worked with Ploshchadka, she and her employees had to listen to lectures by a certain “lawyer Victor” on how to behave with law enforcement agencies in the event of a sudden inspection (Chernaya herself, to the laughter of the audience, summed up the content of these lectures with the phrase “The less you say, the shorter the sentence”).

According to Digaeva, “lawyer Victor” was Belevtsov, who, according to Chernaya’s own guesses, received remuneration for his lectures through the “Ploshchadka”. Belevtsov himself later confirmed the fact of the “consultations”, but said that he did not receive any remuneration for them.

After studying several volumes of cases, a representative of the state prosecution took the floor. He explained that he lived not on one salary (Milan Digaeva drew attention to the discrepancy between his income and expenses at the last meeting), but also on “significant bonuses, which Mrs. Digaeva for some reason forgets about. In addition, my wife Saratovtseva earned 400 thousand a month, which fully allowed us to vacation in Sochi for 850 thousand, and I don’t understand the claims that I couldn’t afford it.” It should be noted that Zakharchenko’s lengthy and detailed speech irritated the judge, and Kritinin, who was sitting behind him, pulled his cap over his face and generally decided to sleep, for which he received a reprimand from Sergei Artemov. In support of Zakharchenko’s words, his defense added (despite the objection of the state prosecution) to the case materials confirming the fact of the return of money to Avsholum Yunaev for a trip to Sochi.