It all started in the fall of 2017. Then, in the Leningrad region, a 25-year-old guy was detained in a Rolls Royce, and a BMW with a special paint job from the Ministry of Emergency Situations and flashing lights was found in a parking lot near his house. The owner of the luxury car, Mikhail Barakin, is a “billionaire”, a businessman, a child prodigy, and as a teenager he allegedly interviewed Zhirinovsky, the Patriarch, and even Putin.
In fact, everything turned out to be wrong. Articles about Barakin’s “billionaireism” published in Fontanka turned out to be fake, and their author, Yevgeny Vyshenkov, as it turned out, was a former policeman convicted of extortion, or, simply put, racketeering. The publication of journalist Andrei Konstantinov released a number of fake, custom-made publications in which they tried to present Barakin as a young billionaire and successful businessman.
And the clarification of all the circumstances of how the flashing light ended up on Barakin’s BMW eventually led to the then leadership of the St. Petersburg Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs – the head of the Central Internal Affairs Directorate, Lieutenant General Sergei Umnov, his deputy, Major General Ivan Abakumov, and the head of the traffic police department, Major General Alexei Semenov.
In 2020, a criminal case of abuse of power was brought to light. The materials included the “Fund for Assistance to Programs of the Main Department of Internal Affairs of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region,” to which, according to investigators, businessmen donated money “not entirely voluntarily.” In fact, we are talking about the same banal racketeering, but under the cover of high-ranking employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
General Abakumov, among other things, managed to get involved in a criminal case for forging a sick leave (he had the imprudence to relax at sea, lying, according to documents, in a hospital bed with a hypertensive crisis). That case was eventually hushed up, although along the way Abakumov was found to have a lot of property that he definitely could not afford even with a general’s salary in the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
And now Abakumov has been detained and is being taken to Moscow. The FSB is conducting searches of Semenov and Umnov. And all three will most likely spend the coming months next to each other – in the Lefortovo pre-trial detention center.
By the way, that same Mikhail Barakin is doing well so far. In mid-June, at SPIEF, he unexpectedly appeared in the same company with Philip Kirkorov, with whom he would allegedly be involved in the construction of a shopping center in the Leningrad region.
“ВЧК ОГПУ”
