The annual turnover of the commodity raiding of security officials is comparable with an annual budget of a Russian city with a population of half a million, according to a report on commodity raiding in Russia called the Kudelko List, which has been presented by human rights activists. Vedomosti writes that the report was prepared by Lora Kudelko, the wife of businessman Vladimir Kudelko who was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment on charges of illegal business and illegal use of trademark. Even before the case was opened, a batch of coffee worth 2 million US dollars was confiscated from Kudelko, and then, as the businessman’s wife was able to prove, the product was sold, although it was officially considered partly confiscated and partly – passed “for safekeeping.”
Having analysed cases of businessmen whose goods were also confiscated and then sold, Kudelko arrived at the conclusion that the scheme of confiscations was almost always the same, the newspaper stresses. Once a potential victim was selected, the company that came to the attention of unscrupulous law enforcers, was attached to an already opened criminal smuggling case. They seize not the company, but major batches of liquid goods belonging to it, Lora Kudelko specified. After that the investigator signs the search warrant (seizure) of the goods, after which they are removed to secure storage at warehouses of companies accredited to the Russian Federal Property Fund (was included in the Federal Property Management Agency – Rosimushchestvo). Then the director of such a company writes an explanation that during unloading the goods deteriorated and that it is necessary to urgently sell them, at the same time the price of the goods sometimes is underestimated by several orders of magnitude. As a result, the product is sold to an “intermediate” firm, which sells it at the normal market price. The difference is shared between the scheme participants.
The Kudelko family has succeeded in opening criminal cases, however most of them were filed against unknown persons. Those law enforcement officers who covered the scheme and participated in the seizure of products that belonged to the company owned by Kudelko, have not yet been punished.
Among those who were put on the Kudelko List (and the married couple could prove that the goods were seized illegally, but nobody was brought to responsibility) are the already former law enforcement officers: someone did not pass merit rating, as former deputy head of the Interior Ministry’s economic security department Andrei Khorev, somebody resigned, as, for example, the son of vice speaker of the Federation Council Svetlana Orlova – Vladimir. And someone was just transferred to another job, such as Gulnara Mutsafina who at some point became an adviser for the Public Administration Reform Department in the Kremlin.
However, part of the persons figuring in the Kudelko List is known to human rights activists by the so-called Magnitsky List. They also appear in the case of entrepreneur Alexei Kozlov: ex-head of the Investigative Committee of the Interior Ministry Alexei Anichin and his deputy Alexander Matveyev, Deputy Prosecutor General Viktor Grin, head of the legal department of the Prosecutor General’s Office Oleg Logunov, Judge of the Tverskoi Court of Moscow Yelena Stashina who is known for extending the arrest terms for Magnitsky and the sick Natalya Gulevich.
The story of entrepreneurs who have lost their business and who have turned to law enforcement agencies for help and reported corruption facts may, given such a coherent system, now fall under the new article of the RF Criminal Code – Defamation, which was returned to the Criminal Code last week by the lawmakers, said Yelena Panfilova of Transparency International.
Unfortunately, all these lists for officials are useless, as people from the Magnitsky List in the bureaucratic environment are perceived almost as heroes, says Panfilova’s colleague Kirill Kabanov.