The Russian Investigative Committee on Thursday accused the head of the Military-Topographic Department of the Russian General Staff, Rear Admiral Sergei Kozlov, of abuse of power inflicting grave consequences and fraud on an especially large scale. According to the investigation, Kozov caused nine million rubles worth of damage to the country by selling nautical charts to commercial companies.
Sources from the Investigative Committee’s chief military investigation department have said that in July 2010, Kozlov gave knowingly illicit orders to Captain First Rank Yuri Rozhkov, to sign license contracts with two commercial companies, the Rossiiskaya Gazeta writes. This document practically delegated them the rights to use and sell unique military nautical charts. Trade in charts was booming for several months. Kozlov must have had a finger in the pie. According to the investigators, as a result of an illegal deal, the state lost all in all more than $9.5 million in 2010- 2011.
Commercial companies Chart Pilot and Transas got the right to sell navigation charts, the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily writes. The web site of Chart Pilot indeed offers for sale nautical pilot charts and atlases, including nautical charts of the Defense Ministry’s Chief Department of Navigation and Oceanography. “That part of the collection, which describes the territories of the former Soviet Union, where foreign hydrographical services could not make research, may be of a special interest for navigators,” it said. Kozlov is also accused of hushing up the existence of an apartment in Istra, outside Moscow. And as an officer in need of housing, he received from the Defense Ministry in 2008 another apartment, in Moscow. He soon re-registered the apartment in the name of his step daughter, who then promptly privatized the apartment. The investigation puts the cost of real property at 18 million rubles.