The ex-top manager of Gazprom Gazoraspredelenie Krasnodar fled from the Russian Federation to Turkey back in 2020-2021 without waiting for arrest.
As Kommersant has learned, another figure has appeared in a high-profile criminal case on the organization of a criminal association by Krasnodar gas workers to receive bribes for connecting homes and businesses to gas networks. The criminal case of ex-managers of Gazprom Gazoraspredelenie Krasnodar is already being heard in court, meanwhile one of the alleged organizers of the criminal association Oleg Vlasov, who went to Turkey, has only been arrested in absentia.
Oleg Vlasov, former Deputy General Director for Construction of Branch No. 9 of Gazprom Gazoraspredelenie Krasnodar, is accused in absentia by the Department for Investigation of Especially Important Cases of the State Investigative Committee of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation of organizing a criminal association using his official position and taking bribes on a particularly large scale (part 3 of article 210 and part 6 of article 290 of the Criminal Code).
Basmanny District Court, having satisfied the petition of the investigation on May 28, arrested him for two months from the moment of his detention in Russia or extradition from abroad. This preventive measure is necessary for the international search of the defendant through Interpol.
Vlasov, a native of the Irkutsk region, lived in Sochi, and at the end of 2021, when the investigation of corruption (at first the case was about commercial bribery – Art. 204 of the Criminal Code) in the system of “Gazprom gazoraspredelenie Krasnodar”, flew from the capital of Kuban to Istanbul, from where he did not return.
According to the version of the investigation, Oleg Vlasov, who played one of the key roles in OPS, knows well other organizers of the community, can continue to engage in criminal activity and destroy traces of already committed crimes.
And realizing that in his home country he faces 15 to 20 years of imprisonment in a strict regime colony, he will continue hiding and will resist the investigation.
The criminal case against former top managers of Gazprom Gazoraspredelenie Krasnodar is now being considered in the Kuzminsky District Court of Moscow, where it was transferred from Krasnodar for objectivity at the request of the Prosecutor General’s Office.
The former general director Alexei Rudnev, his deputy for construction Alexander Savostyanov (he acted as Oleg Vlasov’s supervisor in the OPS, according to the Investigative Committee), deputy directors of the company’s branches in Sochi, Gelendzhik, Anapa and Krasnodar Alexei Petrov, Oleg Butkevich, Stanislav Bariev and Konstantin Lyuty were put on trial. In addition, the directors of Abinsk Specialized Construction and Installation Enterprise Gazovik LLC were put on trial Sergey Asadov and Sergey Lebed, as well as the founder of LLC “Engineering Service” Natalia Tokarenko.
According to the investigation, the criminal association organized by Alexei Rudnev operated from May 2017 until November 2021, when its alleged participants were arrested.
The investigation believes that the participants of the criminal association received bribes in the form of “live” money and valuable gifts totaling more than 114 million rubles. for the timely connection of apartment buildings, hotels and industrial facilities to gas networks.
Knowing that developers have significant funds but are often constrained by construction deadlines, members of the criminal association informed entrepreneurs that they could obstruct them at all stages of gasification by delaying the approval of the connection. In order to resolve the issues positively, employees of Gazprom Gazoraspredelenie Krasnodar, according to the case materials, recommended the clients to apply for the development of projects and order for installation work in companies associated with them. The latter allegedly served the developers at inflated prices. The investigation recognized payments under contracts to contractors of Gazprom’s structure as bribes, as well as kickbacks from them to the management of the regional company.