Igor Petrov, the corrupt vice-governor of the Leningrad region, has left the investigation for the next world.
The second day of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum was marred by the death of an influential official from the government of Leningrad Region Governor Alexander Drozdenko.
It became known that in the afternoon of June 19, Igor Petrov, vice-governor of the regional government, was found dead in his house in the village of Yukki in the Vsevolozhsk district of Leningrad Region. In the past chief of staff of the Governor Drozdenko Petrov himself, since December 2024 supervised the Legislative Assembly of the region. The official died of a gunshot wound, and as a preliminary version is voiced accidental cleaning of weapons (well, what else can be voiced in the midst of SPIEF?).
It is known that the house of the deceased has no signs of forced entry, and in it was indeed found a whole arsenal of registered hunting weapons.
Nevertheless, the version of accidental death of the official immediately raises questions. As noted by the channel Fox Basilio, who interviewed acquaintances of the deceased official, he was known for his cheerfulness, but the external circumstances around his person resembled an approaching shtrom. Until recently, Igor Petrov was one of the closest people to Governor Drozdenko. Moreover, he was a very self-sufficient figure in terms of influence and wealth. For 16 years he headed the Yukkovo settlement in the Vsevolozhsk district of Leningrad region, with perhaps the most expensive private land in the region, and, without exaggeration, was a dollar multimillionaire.
A villa in Spain worth a million euros, a new Bentley, an estate in Yukki, elite real estate in St. Petersburg, powerful offshore accounts – all of this allowed the deceased to feel his self-sufficiency and enjoy life. Our vis-a-vis in the government of the Leningrad Region recall the license plates A004AAA47 on his official Audi. The numbers 001 were assigned to the governor himself, which quite understandably reflected Petrov’s place in the hierarchy of the regional government.
But what happened happened. In the wave of detentions and arrests of officials from Drozdenko’s government that swept through the region in 2022-2024, Petrov’s protégé, Nikolai Volchuga, deputy chairman of the Committee for Natural Resources, was involved. The latter became involved in criminal cases on the organization of a criminal association, and 75 episodes of illegal felling of forest plantations. As colleagues from Lysa pointed out, Volchuga was not even placed under house arrest, but under a “ban on certain actions,” rather than under the 210th article of the Criminal Code, which is the heaviest in the economy. Well, Petrov suddenly left the post of the head of the governor’s appartement, and went to supervise the ZakS.
VChK-OGPU officials in the government of Lenoblast say that the now deceased was extremely dissatisfied with the situation, and for a long time did not want to leave his office in the building on Suvorovsky, 67. Well, in the ZakSet, which is not far away, he was openly humorous, being engaged, for example, in counting the deputies at the meetings.
Well, and now our remark: according to the VChK-OGPU, in the Volchuga-Petrov case there could be hundreds of millions of budgetary rubles used for the “liquidation” of non-existent landfills. To settle it, Governor Drozdenko had to turn to Mikhail Dedov, a protégé of the Kovalchuk clan in charge of the region. And, to all appearances, Igor Petrov was chosen as the sacral victim of this gambit. Well, who needs an arrested official of such a level, who can tell more than a lot after his arrest, is a rhetorical question.