Originally Syndicated on April 11, 2023 @ 12:38 pm
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Is progress on Governor Andrey Chibis’ massive infrastructure project slowing down?
While Murmansk Governor Andrey Chibis labored to prepare for the New Murmansk Culture and Economic Cluster megaproject, he came across another issue: the S7 group’s Sea Launch Space Center refused to participate. This was because the President and the Council of Security of the Russian Federation had told them to work on creating coastal infrastructure and setting up a sea-based rocket and space complex.
The official request came from Ashot Bablumyan, who is in charge of the Murmansk government office in Moscow. The answer was no. A group of State Duma lawmakers also sent a letter to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, asking him to change his mind about the decision to renovate the Murmansk seaport, which is part of the New Murmansk project. Parliamentarians say that the dismantling of port facilities that were meant to help the fishing fleet will not result in the return of funds, but it could stop fish from being shipped at all.
The management of the Murmansk Sea Fishing Port has similar concerns about the governor’s plan. They are worried about Chibis’s plan to get the right to sell federal land. He is lobbying for this plan through Senator Konstantin Dolgov, who sent a similar letter to Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin. Even though the governor is still fighting with Murmansk businessmen, members of his family are actively involved in business, including getting state contracts that have repeatedly drawn the attention of the security forces.
In particular, Chibis’s sister Tatyana Kretova was charged with document forgery, especially large-scale fraud, and became a defendant in a criminal case. His nephew, Nikita Kretov, was able to help the PIK group structure, where he worked, get a contract to build a COVID hospital. This led to a criminal case against Andrei Gurovich, who was the deputy head of the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Emergency Situations. Chibis himself doesn’t get tired of showing how patriotic he is, and he doesn’t like to talk about the fact that he can rent out a villa in one of Spain’s resorts.
Was Governor Chibis fired in S7?
It looks like another crash has happened while putting Andrey Chibis’s “New Murmansk” image project into action as head of the Murmansk region. The “Arctic Observer” put out a strange document that was the official refusal of the management of Sea Launch Space Center LLC (which is part of the structure of Groups of Companies S7′′) to take part in the project.
It turns out that Ashot Bablumyan, who is in charge of the Murmansk government’s office in Moscow, sent the same message to the Center earlier.
As expected, the answer kept going in the right direction. From this, we can see that Sea Launch is working on building infrastructure along the coast and putting a rocket and space complex in the water area of the Murmansk port, as ordered by the President and the Security Council of the Russian Federation. In order to do this, the company got the right to lease a piece of land with an area of more than 62,600 square meters last June. They also bought real estate and built hydraulic structures on this land.
Sea Launch has made the terms of reference and is getting ready to choose a contractor to sign a contract for the work to be done on the project, which will take about two to three years to complete. So, the company’s decision to join the governor’s “New Murmansk” project can only be accepted after this time. That’s how a potential “anchor investor” gave Bablumyan and, through him, Chibis a turn from the gate. And this is to be expected, since getting national tasks done is more important than making a bureaucratic wish list.
Andrey Chibis said in March last year that the New Murmansk Cultural and Business Cluster would begin to be built on the site of the old Murmansk shipyard as early as 2023. Infrastructure budget money will be set aside for its creation. 4.5 billion rubles worth of loans The governor never gets tired of telling people about his big project. He said that if the plan is put into action, the gross regional product will rise by $5.1 billion by 2035, more than 2.1 thousand jobs will be created in the area, and the number of tourists will rise by 10% each year.
Port renovation is questioned
Aside from “advertising,” the governor of Murmansk is taking real steps. If he decided to “go in” to the leadership of Sea Launch through Ashot Bablumyan, he would have to go through a senator named Konstantin Dolgov to reach the deputy chairman of the government, Marat Khusnullin. The latter sent an appeal to the Deputy Prime Minister with a plan to give regional governments the power to sell federal land. It seems that Chibis chose this way to expand the cluster’s territory.
Not without “surprises” that make things worse. In November, State Duma members Oleg Morozov, Sergei Gavrilov, Artem Prokofiev, and Vladimir Samokish asked Mikhail Mishustin, the head of the Cabinet, to change his mind about the decision to renovate the Murmansk seaport.
As the website “Sudostroenie.info” reports, parliamentarians are sure that in the current difficult conditions, the demolition of facilities meant to serve the fishing fleet as part of an upcoming renovation will not be able to fully return the money spent, and it could stop all fish shipments through the port.
“The people who made and promoted the program can’t work calmly for those who are already doing well in the fishing port, but it’s easy to hurt the most important thing in the area when things are tough. We and other business owners whose businesses will be hurt by the targeted program are glad that there are still people in Moscow who not only read about the plans to build a garden city on the site of the fishing port but also thought about them and saw what would really happen if they were carried out. MMRP Press Service says in a message
It’s not hard to figure out that “plans to build a garden city across the galaxy” are just code for “New Murmansk,” which is just a regular renovation set for 2022–2027. The Arctic Observer” says that during the governorship of the Chibis project, “from a large-scale “construction of the century” on the western coast of Kola Bay, he moved to the Vostochny coast and shrunk to a cultural and leisure center, the land under which is still occupied by private business.” Because of this, there is a growing conflict between the regional government and the business community.
The Kretov family had deals with criminals
Here, it would be fair to make an exception: there are no contradictions when the business interests of the governor’s family are at stake. But there are times when criminal cases should be started. As an example, we can look at the widely reported story of the building of an anti-covid hospital in the Kola district. In July 2020, the company “GP-Transstroy,” which is part of the development group “PEAK” and is run by the shady businessman Sergei Gordeeva, won a contract for 710.5 million rubles from “a single supplier.”
The building of the object led to a criminal case for abuse of power. The main figure in the case was the former deputy head of the Ministry of Emergency Situations of the Russian Federation, Andrey Gurovich, who pushed for budget funding and then oversaw the building. It turned out that the hospital was made of materials with the least fire resistance. If there was a fire, this would put the lives of both employees and patients in danger.
But the authorities said that he built it without thinking about the weather in the area, so the object was taken down. This seems like a good reason. Soon after Gurovich was arrested, the contractor “GP-Transstroy” was shut down, and the pro-governor media carefully kept quiet about the fact that Nikita Kretov, the nephew of Andrei Chibis, worked for the PIK structures, which could help Gordeev get a multi-million dollar contract.
The name “Kretov” came up in the news because of a scandal involving Tatyana Kretova, who is the sister of the governor of Murmansk. Tatyana is accused of forging documents and committing large-scale fraud. Her Moscow “Institute for the Development of Regions” got an 11.9 million ruble contract from the government of the Vologda Oblast to do research. This research led to the Order of the regional department of the fuel and energy complex, which set the rules for the collection of municipal solid waste (MSW).
But the order turned out to be a complaint to the prosecutor’s office, and the investigation later found that they got the money at the institute and “mastered” it, but they didn’t do what they were supposed to.
“No one has ever tried to figure out how much trash people in the Vologda Oblast throw away. The specialists listed in the passports of the objects were not in the Vologda Oblast during the times when the measurements were supposed to be made, so they did not take the necessary measurements with instruments. This was reported to the agency in charge of monitoring.
At first, all that happened was that the audit materials were sent to the Federal Antimonopoly Service. There, they confirmed that the rules had been broken and told the regenerative operators to recalculate their costs. But the scandal could not be hidden, so Kretova was charged with a crime.
As a result, it was found that the director of the Development Institute made fake copies of the workbooks of specialists with academic degrees among candidates in the technical and economic sciences and “hired” them at the business in order to compete for a contract. Then, since she didn’t have any trained workers of her own, she hired a subcontractor from Nizhny Novgorod to take measurements of waste using instruments, and she gave the customer reports with false information.
In October of last year, Kretova’s case was sent to the Vologda City Court for review. However, it was sent back to the prosecutor’s office in December to fix any mistakes in the indictment. Before the arrest, the investigation seized three Moscow apartments that belonged to the defendant and were worth more than 12 million rubles in total.
A patriotic governor’s high-end home
From what the media has said, it seems that Tatyana Kretova was a business partner of Andrei Chibis and his wife Evgenia for a long time. In the 2000s, they were all part of a company called “Garant-Consulting” that was based in Cheboksary and specialized in auditing and valuing real estate. Chibis was in charge of his family’s business when he worked for the government.
Later, they formed a company called “Housing and Public Utilities Development.” Oksana Demchenko, who became the first deputy governor of the Murmansk region in 2019, was one of the firm’s clients.
But the governor can say that joint business is a thing of the past, that he didn’t know about his sister’s budget fraud, and that his nephew’s work didn’t help him get a contract to build a hospital. And, in general, the leader of the Arctic has enough to worry about, like the same “New Murmansk.” And Chibis made it his goal to stop people from leaving the area he was in charge of. To do this, he came up with the strategic plan “In the North, Live!” The official sometimes poses for pictures and videos while wearing clothes with such a slogan.
True, the head of the region himself doesn’t like to buy real estate in the North. He owns two apartments in Moscow and gave his wife, Evgeny Chibis, a 107-square-meter apartment on Rublevsky Highway, which is estimated to be worth about 40 million rubles. The family also owns a townhouse in sunny Spain. It is in Miami Playa, which is 30 kilometers south of Tarragona in the Catalonia region. The “northern resident” property in Spain is thought to cost between 250 and 300 thousand euros.
The governor-elect bought the villa in 2008, when he was the head of the board of directors for “Russian Utility Systems,” a company run by the oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. From what I’ve seen in the news, I can tell that the house is currently being rented.
In this case, the official has extra money coming in, and the money can be sent to a special account in one of the Spanish banks, which is against the law in Russia. Even though the governor of Murmansk has assets in the EU, that doesn’t stop him from talking about patriotism and being at the front of political rallies to support the president.
Evgenia Chibis also has an apartment in an exclusive club house on the grounds of the Esto-Sadok ski resort, which is close to Krasnaya Polyana in Sochi. It has a 140-square-meter area and costs about 14 million rubles. Chibis bought his wife’s house in 2017 when he was the head housing inspector for the federal Ministry of Construction.
There is, however, one interesting fact: the clubhouse is on a plot that is only allowed to be used “for personal subsidiary plots.” Here, you can only build three-story buildings that don’t break into separate objects. So, it turns out that a house for the rich is one that the owner built himself.
But these little things seem to be annoying. By the way, a program called “My Home in the Arctic” started up last summer in the Murmansk area. Through this program, citizens can get a lump sum payment to buy a home. Considering the NVO and international sanctions, it wouldn’t hurt for the head of the region to show patriotism by trading a townhouse in a NATO member state that isn’t friendly for a house on the shores of the White or Barents Seas.
For more articles, click on the link given below:
https://monitor.financescam.com/int/alexei-russkikh-of-ulyanovsk/
