The Prosecutor General's Office caught the garbage operator in overstating salaries

In particular, in 2019, the salary costs of employees, with the consent of the Ministry of Natural Resources, which is the founder of this company, were increased from 79.4 million rubles to 146.6 million. This money was intended for other expenses of the company. As a result, as it turned out during the inspection, the garbage operator did not have a development strategy. In addition, the company did not regularly monitor the regions.

Now REO is already eliminating these violations, writes RBC. The source added that the company's total annual budget was half a billion rubles.

The company was established in 2019 after the introduction of the garbage reform. The goal of this reform is to increase the number of recycled waste in the country and reduce the share of waste disposal. In each region, a regional operator was selected to provide this work. For Russians, the garbage reform turned into an increase in tariffs, since henceforth the cost of garbage disposal is calculated not by the number of square meters, but by the standard for each resident. Moreover, these standards vary greatly depending on the region, and an average of about 30 kilograms of garbage per inhabitant is generated per month.

In September last year, the Audit Chamber recognized the reform as a failure. With over 90% of the garbage still goes to landfills, which continue to poison nature. After the failure of this reform, the head of the Ministry of Natural Resources Dmitry Kobylkin, who is responsible for its implementation, was dismissed. The head of the REO, Ilya Gudkov, was also removed from his post.

By the way, failures in work did not prevent the heads of the REO from receiving huge salaries, bonuses and bonuses. So, Denis Butsaev, appointed in April 2019 to the post of general director of the Russian Ecological Operator (REO), admitted in an interview with RBC: “I have a salary of about 950 thousand [rubles], in my opinion, including bonuses”.

The companies themselves believe that not everything is so hopeless with the reform, just first you need to invest in the program to make it work, Andrey Umnikov, Director General of ROSEKOPRO (Regional Industry Union of Professional Waste Management Operators), commented to Novy Izvestia.

“Why such a deplorable result? Yes, because regional operators, to whose monopoly all market participants have an extremely negative attitude, overwhelmingly deal only with waste disposal to landfills and landfills, and everywhere do not fulfill their responsibilities for sorting and recycling waste”, - he commented.

The second reason is budget cuts. If initially it was planned to allocate 4.3 trillion rubles for the program, now its budget has been reduced to 400 billion, and the allocation of this money has been stretched until 2030.