New criminal cases opened on multimillion-dollar fraud at the "Vostochny" cosmodrome

According to Kommersant, the investigators found out that on June 15 last year, a state contract was signed between the administration of the cosmodrome and JSC TsENKI* (Ground Space Infrastructure Operations Centre - editor's note) for the completion of construction and installation work at the facility “Construction of a complex for the production and storage of rocket fuel components. Site No. 3.2". A month later, TsENKI entered into three agreements with the Moscow construction company Respect-SM LLC. The amount of these contracts amounted to over 4 billion rubles.

The investigation believes that TsENKI should have transferred to the partner 10% of the value of the contracts as an advance. This is evidenced by the concluded contracts. The UK states that in the period from the end of July to November last year, the management of TsENKI exceeded its official powers and sent 700 million rubles to Respect, and in fact, construction and installation work at the facility was completed for 100 million rubles.

At present, the investigation has opened a criminal case against unidentified officials of the UENKI under the article on abuse of office. Since the company has provided a bank guarantee, the damage can be repaid.

Another criminal case is connected with the same object, but we are already talking about fraud on an especially large scale. During the preliminary investigation it was established that Baval LLC, affiliated with Respect-SM, was involved in the construction of the complex for the production and storage of rocket fuel components. In contrast to the first case, both organizations had accounts in the Federal Treasury department, and this allows the state to control their financial transactions. However, they provided fictitious reporting: acts of work performed, including certificates of their cost, costs and an invoice. Thanks to these fake documents, Baval and Respect-SM received 59.8 million rubles from the Treasury. The officials disposed of the money at their own discretion. In fact, "Baval" did not perform any work at the cosmodrome, which means that "Respect-SM" could not accept them.

In the second case, as in the first, there are no defendants at this stage of the investigation.

Recall that at the end of last year, in connection with embezzlements during the construction of Vostochny, it was decided that an audit team formed, in fact, by Roscosmos itself, would control the costs of building the cosmodrome, and Dmitry Rogozin, General Director, personally visits the cosmodrome once a month, the state corporation said.

The construction of the cosmodrome has been underway since 2011. In October 2020, it was decided to allocate an additional 6 billion rubles for the construction of the facility. Thus, the cost of the project has reached 320 billion rubles. At the same time, at least 10 billion of them were stolen. Note that the construction site is accompanied by multiplying criminal cases of corruption and other violations - about one and a half hundred of them were initiated.

Last February, the Accounts Chamber met again check the state corporation Dmitry Rogozin for the effectiveness of spending budget funds. In 2017, the head of the department, Alexei Kudrin, named the total amount of violations that fell on Roskosmos for the year - 785.5 billion rubles.

“Everything has been stolen before us”, - Dmitry Rogozin explained to President Vladimir Putin, pointing out the guilt of the previous leadership.