According to Kommersant, FSB officers extorted money from the son of the former head of Izvestia Publishing House, Erast Galumov, who is being charged in a case of large-scale fraud.
According to the investigation, Galumov, when concluding a contract for the lease of premises, caused damage to the Federal State Unitary Enterprise in the amount of more than 150 million rubles. Belousov and Kolbov were investigating one of the episodes of this case.
“The son of Galumov, Alexander, informed the investigation about the extortionists - people with fictitious names demanded 65 million rubles in bitcoins from him in exchange for a suspended sentence for his father and a refusal of a criminal case for himself”, - reports the TV channel Dozhd.
According to media reports, Major Belousov and Captain Kolbov were detained and arrested in the spring of 2019. Their arrest was a "heavy blow" to the reputation of the FSB: for the first time in the history of the unit, two officers of the FSB Directorate were accused of corruption - taking bribes on an especially large scale (part 6 of Art. 290 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) .
According to Kommersant, Belousov and Kolbov were “extremely cautious” when they demanded money. They "burned out" on a single mistake, which later led to their exposure and arrest. Despite the corruption scandal in the FSB, the accused Galumov did not manage to obtain a mitigation of the preventive measure in his case. He is still in jail. The fraud process is ongoing. In the near future, the court should move on to the arguments of the parties.
The investigation into the case of the security forces has already been completed. In the near future, the Second Western District Military Court in Moscow will start considering the materials. The hearings are expected to be held in public.
Earlier, in the regions of Russia, scandals related to the circulation of cryptocurrencies have repeatedly arisen, in which officers of law enforcement agencies appeared.
In 2017, trying to get rich by mining bitcoins, enterprising businessmen placed an underground farm right on the territory of one of the Kostroma military units. When mining reached such volumes that the increased energy consumption of a part began to arouse suspicion, the dealers moved the equipment to a rented premises on the territory of the former Motordetal plant.
“As follows from the materials of the preliminary investigation of the Military Investigation Department of the RF IC for the Kostroma garrison, a contract serviceman was engaged in servicing the farms under the patronage of one of the commanders. When expanding the business, the military involved civilian investors in the business, but soon a conflict arose between them on financial grounds. A contract soldier who served the farm said that he had “lost the keys” to other people's electronic wallets, and now access to the bitcoins worth several million rubles, obtained during mining, has been lost”, - RG reports.
During the initial check, the investigator of the IC of RF Artyom Izyumov did not see any signs of corpus delicti in the actions of the "miners in uniform" and issued an order refusing to initiate a criminal case on fraud.