Use of compromising evidence in the media (using examples of the Republic of Dagestan)

As examples of the use of compromising material in political struggle, we will cite two publications from the Dagestan weekly magazine “New Business”. The first of them belongs to A. Melamedov, it is dedicated to the confrontation between the mayor of Kaspiysk and the population, which, as the author of the article points out, has grown into a war of incriminating evidence.

Take, for example, the chairman of the Caspian Public Council Magomed Abakarov. In the city he is known under the nickname Business Magician. At one time, I appointed this man as the head of the production department of housing and communal services, which united all the city's public utilities. Do you want to know how he worked in this position? Here I have a very interesting certificate from auditors, you can read it.

Look how this Abakarov managed city money. We allocated him 4 million rubles to prepare for winter. He spent them in a very unique way. For 1,341 thousand rubles, he purchased a transformer from the Yuldash peasant farm, which is headed by his brother. At the same time, an enslaving purchase and sale agreement was drawn up, according to which, in case of late payment, the buyer paid the seller a penalty in the amount of 3% of the transaction amount per day. This works out to 40,000 rubles per day. Within a month, the transaction amount doubles. True, when the head of the peasant farm filed a claim with the Arbitration Court, they broke this deal. The Deputy Chairman of the Arbitration Court, a former prosecutor, said that this is obvious fraud and such a penalty cannot exist.

There are many similar facts in this document. For example, Abakarov bought a Volga from a private person for 256 thousand rubles. I also bought a Volga at the same time, but bought it for 178 thousand. Moreover, I bought a new car, and he used it. By such actions, Abakarov caused great material damage to the city and was removed from his job by me. I wanted to initiate a criminal case against him, but the prosecutor refused me. The fact is that it was he who at one time begged me to hire Abakarov. So who is the thief after this - him or me?

And all his “compromising evidence” on me is not worth a penny. The Moscow Cinema, for example, was not privatized by me and was not evaluated by me. There is a special commission that assessed it. To be honest, we didn’t know what to do with this cinema, how to maintain it. And now this will be the best cinema in the republic. The investor has already invested 100 million rubles in its reconstruction and will invest another 40.

Now the second person in this “public council” is Kurban Abdurashidov. He was my deputy. He constantly told me: “What a pleasure it is to work with you, and not with these bandits who worked before you.” By the way, I was not eager to become mayor; I was appointed. Here I have an open letter from a deputy stating that Abdurashidov embezzled 6 welding units worth 30 thousand dollars. Having a three-room apartment for three people, he registered a plot of land for construction on the territory of a sports lyceum, the land of which is federal property. So who is the thief - him or me?

The third in this team is Albert Dzhabrailov. The former director of the sports lyceum, who destroyed this lyceum. The then Minister of Education Nizami Kaziev relieved him of this position. And today all these “honest” people are fighting for the truth, throwing mud at me. I’m selling both the coast and the Dagenergo city park.

But in fact, we did not sell the park, but protected it. Two years ago the sea was destroying it before our eyes. If it weren’t for Dagenergo, we would have lost not only the park, but also Lenin Street. I have photographs that clearly show what was there and what happened. Let's go there after this press conference and you will see for yourself. And we’ll go to the cinema so you can see everything with your own eyes.

Muhu Gimbatovich has repeatedly said that it is not necessary to locate all ministries and departments in Makhachkala. Kaspiysk's own income today does not reach 60 million rubles a year. And Dagenergo will give us 85-90 million in taxes annually.

Jamaludin Omarov was brief in his answers to questions from the assembled journalists.

Are my relatives in the administration? Yes, the same Abakarov hired them, apparently, he wanted to please me. He pulled his wife's brother, who works as the chief engineer of electrical networks, from Buinaksk, where they still regret that he left them. Specialist of the highest category. He appointed my nephew as the head of the URC; by the way, this is the only single settlement center in the republic that provides 100% collections.

Selling recreational land? For all these objects there is an order from the government of the republic, which I was obliged to comply with. That is why none of these cases have come to court and are unlikely to come to court.

And here is another episode from Abakarov’s biography. It was he who privatized the Caspian haberdashery factory “Kasp-text” at one time. Shortly before privatization, the director of the factory, Abakarov’s predecessor, died inexplicably. 400 people worked at this enterprise, all of them lost their jobs. Now there are several wholesale stores on the territory of the former factory. These are the people who are fighting for justice in Kaspiysk.

The essence of the speeches boiled down to the following: during Omarov’s work, only positive changes occurred. From a hotbed of crime, where “all honest and successful people here were simply shot,” Kaspiysk has turned into one of the most comfortable and well-appointed cities in the republic. And if it weren’t for the media, which “spread Abakarov’s false fabrications,” no one would have noticed “this storm in a teacup.”

After the press conference, journalists were taken to explore the city park and the Moscow cinema. Along the way, Omarov proudly showed off his city. “Look how clean we are. You won’t find a single heap of garbage anywhere, let alone in Makhachkala. And I saved all the trees. And I plant new ones every year. And how many flower beds I have broken! You won’t find as many flowers as in Kaspiysk anywhere in the republic.”

In response to a question from an ND correspondent about the grenade recently thrown at Abakarov’s entrance, the mayor said the following:

Yes, he blew it up himself to cast a shadow on me. How else can we explain the fact that a pin ring was found at the scene of the explosion? It turns out that someone first threw a grenade into the entrance, and then threw a pin after it. It is more logical to assume that the grenade was thrown from the entrance where Abakarov’s apartment is located on the first floor. By the way, this is not the first grenade in his biography. Soon after his appointment as head of Pozhkkh, he turned to me with a request to provide him with security. I refused and laughed, what kind of enemies do you have? And two days later, exactly the same grenade exploded near his apartment. So draw your conclusions...

The ND correspondent decided to refrain from drawing any conclusions; after all, this is a matter for the investigation. Instead, he met with Magomed Abakarov and asked him to comment on his opponent’s statements.

He's back to his old ways again. Last summer, Omarov already demonstrated this fake act to journalists, and MK in Dagestan cited excerpts from it. And here we go again. When a person cannot object to his opponent on the merits, he tries to throw mud at him, this is an old trick. On January 21, we planned to hold a citywide rally; our posters have already been hung around the city. The recent press conference is the mayor's attempt to deflect the blow.

If all these accusations against me were even half true, I would have been in prison a long time ago. And no amount of help from “my patron-prosecutor” would have saved me. Can you imagine a city attorney who won't accept submissions from the mayor? I can't. By the way, this prosecutor Akhmed Magaramov was removed from his job after my numerous appeals to all authorities regarding the inaction of the prosecutor’s office, which allowed the mayor to turn the city into a feeding trough.

I quit POZHKH of my own free will, no one kicked me out of work. He resigned after all the numerous commissions completed their inspection of the enterprise. Look at Omar's act to see if my signature is on it. No, because this paper is fabricated. And these, look, are the signed acts. This one was compiled by employees of the UBEP, this one by the city finance department. I also have other acts; I keep all the documentation at home in case of such provocations. But these two acts coincide in the time of their preparation with the “act” of the mayor. Read it and make sure that no financial irregularities have been found in the company. Artificially high penalty? I can’t say anything here, I don’t remember, after all, seven years have passed. But I can say and prove that the head of the Yuldash peasant farm is not my relative. He and I are simply namesakes; this is not uncommon in Dagestan.

And I bought the Volga from scratch, if anyone wants to make sure of this, let them go to the traffic police. And I have a certificate that the car of this configuration at that time cost as much as I paid for it. And if you want the truth, the conflict with Omarov arose after I began to identify financial and other irregularities in the city’s housing and communal services enterprises. There was a fuss about the fact that the old pipes were being replaced with old ones brought from Chechnya. Then Omarov got angry and told me to leave. And at the same time they sent a dozen inspectors to me, I even had to set a schedule for issuing documentation to them. By the way, it was in connection with these pipes that the first grenade was thrown at me, they warned me not to stick my nose where it shouldn’t. But I have a principle, like Zheglov and Sharapov: a thief should be in prison. That’s why I didn’t back down then, and I won’t back down now. A thief should sit in jail! And he will be in prison.

But I was especially amused by what Omarov said about his relatives. Where, tell me, could I find out that a wonderful engineer and part-time brother of Takibat Makhmudova, the wife of Jamal Omarov, works in Buinaksk? This wonderful engineer worked in the energy supervision department, checking the correct installation of meters. And I appointed a really smart guy, Sirazhutdin Amiraliev, as the chief engineer of city networks. So they forced me to fire him two days later; a position was cleared for a relative.

To be honest, I find it boring to talk about this topic. There is a catastrophic lack of time; we need to prepare for the rally. The Omarov clan cannot be allowed to retain power in the city. But he will achieve nothing by slander. For every false word, I have an official document confirming that I am right. Otherwise, it is impossible - if you have already embarked on the path of fighting the authorities, you must constantly be prepared for any provocations.

The second publication is also from “Novoye Delo”, but it belongs to the “custom”: in the next issue, “Novoye Delo” published its apologies to the persons mentioned in the article - the Israpilov brothers (it belongs to the series “Long-term construction from “NOVOSTROY”, author - Shamil Pakhrutdinov):

On March 15, 2007, the Novolakskaya Prosecutor's Office opened criminal case No. 73112 under Article 285, Part 1, and Article 160, Part 4, of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. The case file states: “During the verification of Tskhaev’s statement about illegal actions on the part of the management of the Novostroy TP, Aliev, Eremkina and other authorized persons during the liquidation of the Novostroy TP, it was established that officials in the criminal group, using their official powers, They squandered the state property entrusted to them in the form of material assets in the amount of more than 7 million rubles.” The arrest report dated March 28, 2007 states: “The director of the MSO Novolakskoye was detained at 12:30 p.m.”

Detention

Eyewitnesses directly point to Budaichiev as the person who committed the crime. As a result, Kamalutdin Budaichiev was taken from his home in Makhachkala in an unknown direction on the morning of March 28, 2007, in violation of all procedural norms. In a telegram addressed to the prosecutor of the Republic of Dagestan dated March 29, his daughter Dzhamilya Budaichieva indicates: “In the criminal case No. 5749 known to you regarding the bankruptcy of the Novostroy TP, the investigation of which is at the completion stage in the Investigative Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Dagestan, Kamalutdin Budaichiev was placed in a temporary detention facility and detained, and not the actual perpetrators. After all, Kamalutdin Budaichiev visited you twice regarding the failure to disclose and investigate criminal cases initiated at the Kumtorkalinsky District Department of Internal Affairs regarding the deliberate bankruptcy of the Novostroy TP.”

On April 3, 2007, Kamalutdin Budaichiev applied to the prosecutor's office of the Novolaksky district with a request for a confrontation with Tskhaev, whom Budaichiev considers a fictitious person, and the case was fabricated against him after the appearance of the article “Long-term construction from Novostroy” in “ND” dated March 9, 2007.

Budaichiev is a bankruptcy creditor of the Novostroy TP and represents 000 MSO, as well as the heads of many organizations. And now it seems to him that they will also be persecuted. The wording applied to Budaichiev in criminal case No. 73112 of March 15, 2007 - about abuse of power - is unauthorized, because he represents an economic entity. Budaichiev himself explains his detention by the fact that, according to the conversations of many “comrades,” he took an active part in the election campaign in the Novolaksky district.

“Attempts” to improve health

Based on government decree No. 123, clause 8, dated May 31, 1999, TP “Novostroy” was allowed to write off and sell worn-out equipment at its residual value. The same resolution applied to the external manager of the Novostroy TP Aliev and the accountant Eremkina. And there was also a letter that said: “To the external manager of the Novostroy TP Aliyev. To your request No. 35 dated October 24, 2002. The Department of the Government of the Republic of Dagestan for Resettlement Issues does not object to the sale of equipment that is out of order to pay off wage arrears in the prescribed manner, according to an assessment carried out by a forensic examination on the instructions of the Department for Economic Crimes of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Dagestan. Head of Department Nazhmudin Dadaev" (spelling and style of documents preserved).

External manager Nasreddin Aliyev wanted to improve the situation in the Novostroy TP, but his plans and the plans of the Government Resettlement Department did not coincide. As a result, he was replaced by Magomed Osmanov.

….On February 14, 2001, the Government Resettlement Office issued an order, assembled and organized the work of the commission, and accepted the complex of nine production facilities into operation without any comments. The external manager of the Novostroy TP at that time, Nasreddin Aliyev, pointed out that the actions of the Government Department were aimed at the deliberate bankruptcy of the organization. After publications in the media, I received the original order dated February 21, 2001, and not February 14, 2001, which appears everywhere, on the appointment of the State Acceptance Commission in pursuance of clause 4 of the Minutes of the meeting of the Government of the Republic of Dagestan dated February 13, 2001 No. 36-09 . The protocol was adopted by the General Administration Department of the State Council on February 20, 2001, and then an order was issued on February 21, 2001.

Frauds with signatures of state commission acts were discussed in the article “Long-term construction from Novostroy.” In fact, all subsequent actions were based on illegal acts and a “tailored” order. In a response to the chief of police of the Kum-Torkalinsky District Department of Internal Affairs, Ataev, the Ministry of Construction and Architecture of the Republic of Dagestan indicated that “in the acts on acceptance of objects for operation, there are significant non-compliance with the requirements of TSN 12-308-2000.” They could improve the situation at the enterprise of a single general contractor for resettlement, and the problem of resettlement of the area would have been resolved long ago. There were all possibilities for this.

The Novostroy trust, due to lack of financing and the inability to stop production, was forced to take out a bank loan. In a letter dated February 12, 2001 No. 1-14/91 of the Ministry of Construction and Architecture of the Republic of Dagestan it was stated: “Payment of trust employees for forced downtime should be made at the expense and within the limits of funds allocated to the Directorate of NAKStroy, regarding the issue of compensation collected for time forced downtime in the 1996-1998 tax years, we consider it appropriate to take into account this amount in the amount of 1,958,911 rubles as advance payments.” By Resolution of January 12, 2001 No. 07-3/49, the Ministry of Economy of the Republic of Dagestan allowed 1 million rubles to be used to replenish working capital of the Novostroy TP, but Nakstroy counted this amount as accounts payable, and the Ministry of Economy considers the Directorate’s actions to be unfounded and worsening the the difficult situation of the Novostroy trust.”

Whose property?

The “specialist’s conclusion” of the Department for Tax Crimes of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Dagestan dated May 15, 2006 indicates the absence of documents confirming the legality of the auction when the property of the TP “Novostroy” was sold. The list of objects transferred from the external manager Aliyev to the bankruptcy manager of the Novostroy TP Osmanov does not include a store building. According to the certificate of Dagagropromstroy OJSC, according to the accounting reports and corporatization materials of the Lak MSO (inter-farm construction organization - Author), as of July 1, 1992, the enterprise’s balance sheet includes unfinished capital construction, a production base on the lands of the collective farm named after. Zhdanov Laksky district. There is a certificate from the Ministry of Property and Land Relations of the Republic of Dagestan dated May 3, 2006 No. 09-906/08, which indicates that the production base is the property of OJSC Lakskaya MSO.

To the request of the prosecutor of the Kumtorkalinsky district, the bankruptcy trustee Gabibulakh Amakhanov replies: “During the analysis of accounting and other documentation belonging to the Novostroy TP, it was established that the administrative building (office of the Lak MSO), a shed and warehouse premises belonging to the Lak MSO were never listed on the balance sheet of TP “Novostroy” and TP “Novostroy” does not have any property rights to this property.”

Osmanov did not have the right to sell the said property. The chairman of the Laksky District MCO, Akhmed Akhmedov, states in his certificate: “After the criminal case was transferred to the Investigative Committee of the Investigative Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Dagestan, the investigation was finally completed and now it is unknown when the case will be transferred to court, since Osmanov, against whom three criminal cases have already been initiated, has become a deputy village assembly of the village of Darada, Gergebil region."

In criminal case No. 5749, those who signed the protocol on the auction indicate that they did not sign the document. The document from the UNP Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Dagestan dated May 15, 2006 states that there are no documents confirming the deposit of funds in the cash office in the amount of 83.5 thousand rubles in payment for warehouse premises and the control house. Only a deposit was paid - 10 thousand rubles.

In his letter to the president of the republic, the chairman of the MSO of the Laksky district, Akhmedov, wrote: “Behind all this fraud and criminality is the deputy chairman of the People’s Assembly of the Republic of Dagestan, Artur Israpilov. It was with his knowledge that Ali Israpilov (the brother of the deputy chairman of the People’s Assembly), who works as the deputy head of the administration of the Novolaksky district, illegally registered the property of the MSO of the Laksky district in his wife’s name.” In a letter dated February 10, 2005 No. 716 for the deputy head of the UPN of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Dagestan Amirkhanov, the assistant to the arbitration manager of the Novostroy TP Magomed Musaev and the accountant of the Novostroy TP Siyasat Kurbanova indicate: “The Novostroy TP never, including in 2003, The MSO of the Laksky district did not take production and administrative buildings into its balance sheet. For the supposedly sold administrative building of the MSO in 2003, 20 thousand rubles were credited to the cash register. And the premises of the MSO of the Laksky district were acquired by Saidat Akueva.”

The materials of the criminal case also contain an agreement w/n dated September 10, 2003, concluded between TP “Novostroy” and the individual Saidat Akueva, according to which, in accordance with the terms of the auction for the sale of property (store building), Akueva had to pay before July 18, 2003 year to the cash desk of TP “Novostroy” a deposit of 20 thousand rubles. According to the documents available in the criminal case, this amount of 20 thousand rubles was contributed by her husband Akhmed Akuev on August 22, 2003. Plus, there are no documents confirming the payment of the remaining 45 thousand rubles from the total residual value of 65 thousand rubles to the cash desk of the Novostroy TP.

This is how Magomed Osmanov commented on it: “Even if the preliminary investigation body in the framework of the said criminal case indisputably establishes that the disputed objects really belonged to the MSO of the Laksky district, and not to the Novostroy TP, then in this situation my actions, the transactions concluded and the ownership rights that arose may be subject to dispute, but not criminally punishable.”

Water pipeline

The inspection report of the water pipeline dated January 19, 2000 indicates the cause of water leakage in the water pipeline (these pipes have served their service life and were previously used in the oil and gas industry. - Author) - poor-quality welding and insulation work, as well as damage to the surface of the pipes resulting from the violation installation technologies. In addition, mechanical damage that occurred as a result of the expansion of the Makhachkala-Sulak federal road is also indicated. Construction of the water pipeline began in October 1992. And it was repaired already in 2000. Although the service life of such pipes is at least 25 years.

In Resolution No. 5 of January 5, 2003, water supply was transferred to the balance sheet of the Novolaksky district as completed. But in 2006 alone, about 9.456 million rubles were spent on its repair.

The same picture has emerged in the drainage system and the repair of roads and electrical networks. In total, more than 7.5 million rubles were spent on repair work. All this is not included in the title program for construction work. All of the above work should not be carried out by the main customer at all. However, we must not forget about the so-called kickbacks, which are always present where big money is circulating. It was about them that Magomed Attaev, the first manager of the Novostroy TP, spoke in his interview with one of the republican newspapers, who believes that the so-called repair and restoration work of objects that have not been put into operation should be carried out at the expense of the culprit, i.e. the contractor of these objects ...

Construction

The amount of construction and installation work performed on the facilities of the Novostroy TP, which were not accepted for payment by the customer according to a certificate from the chief engineer of the trust Mamed Musaev, amounted to 771.57 thousand rubles in 2000.

One of these facilities is a sausage shop, which was practically built, where the production line was delivered. TP “Novostroi” was not paid a single ruble for the scope of work completed. The ownerless facility fell into disrepair over time, and the equipment stored in the warehouse disappeared in an unknown direction. As, indeed, many other things related to the ill-fated TP “Novostroy”.

Let me briefly summarize my thoughts.

Novaya Gazeta has been repeatedly exposed for publishing commercial and political propaganda for money. The fact that the newspaper published commissioned materials has been proven beyond any doubt. All publications of the order occurred with the knowledge and consent of the editor-in-chief. There are no meaningful comments from the newspaper's management regarding these episodes.

All any serious PR people in Moscow know how much a commercial order costs in Novaya Gazeta - both in the federal edition and in the regional versions. Personally, I can testify that those articles on the conflict between Deripaska and Ilim Pulp, which were published in Novaya Gazeta under the guise of editorial materials, were offered for publication in Lenta.Ru for money, but were rejected due to their blatantly ordered nature. So I even know how much it cost to publish them in NG.

The customer of the material aimed at discrediting VKontakte could be any applicant for the purchase of a stake in this social network. The price of the issue is estimated at tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars.

In light of the above, the editors of Novaya Gazeta had a very simple choice. Either approach the publication responsibly and provide serious evidence of the authenticity of the incriminating evidence being published, or rely on the fact that people are stealing incriminating evidence without evidence.

The editors chose the second option.

In this connection, I am forced to state: Pavel Durov and Vladislav Tsyplukhin have not deceived me even once, and the editors of Novaya Gazeta deceived exactly as many times as they offered to take their word of honor.

I am not an active user of the VKontakte network, because for people of my age and social status it is more logical to communicate with friends and colleagues on Facebook. But in this particular dispute, I believe Tsyplukhin and Durov that the letters that Novaya published on their behalf are fake. [...]

[@lebedevalex 04/05/2013: In connection with today’s publication in Novaya http://www.novayagazeta.ru/inquests/57525.html ... does @dolboed want to apologize for his words? http://dolboeb.livejournal.com/2486670.html - K.ru insert] Original of this material
© dolboeb, 04/09/2013, Photo: Daily Mail

Response to Novaya Gazeta and its shareholder

In recent days, I have been asked more than once to comment on the situation with Novaya Gazeta.

There is one problem with this comment (which, of course, I sat down to write last Friday, in an Indian village). The fact is that if you deal with my claims to this respected media in detail and to the point, you will end up with 20 screens of text, links, numbers and dates that no one will be interested in reading, except, perhaps, those whom this text directly concerns . And if we present it briefly, then a lot of important things will remain behind the scenes, and it still won’t be short. Be that as it may, I’ll try to figure it out in detail. For ease of subsequent discussion, the points in my answer are numbered and placed under cat.

1. "Novaya Gazeta" and commercial orders

It’s not me who accuses Novaya Gazeta of publishing custom-made leaks of commercial dirt for money. The problem has been exhaustively documented a long time ago and without my participation. A review of commissioned materials paid for by the newspaper during the information war between Deripaska and Smushkin was aired on Radio Liberty and is available on the radio station’s website. There, indeed, we are talking about 2002, but the management of the publication has not changed since then. The listed ordered articles are still available on the newspaper's website. There are no noticeable signs of advertising in them. And enjoy. Maybe someday later the newspaper would be ashamed of the paid articles or their publicity? May be, Yulia Latynina, which today demands not to discuss this story because it is so old, once commented on this broadcast of “Svoboda” in 2002? Maybe the newspaper's editors once apologized to the reader for these false statements and announced their abandonment of the practice of placing custom publications for money? Maybe, Alexander Lebedev, becoming the founder of the publication, promised, is this practice over? I would be glad to know about this. But if there was no public apology to the reader, then I don’t want to discuss kindergarten excuses in the spirit of “it was a long time ago and it wasn’t true”: we are on the Internet, all the moves are recorded here, and Prutkov’s testament “If you lie once, who will believe you?” no one in my memory has canceled it.

2. Don’t pin your black hat on Anna Politkovskaya

Novaya Gazeta truly employs brave and dedicated investigative journalists. Over the years, some of the newspaper’s employees paid with their lives for the right to call a spade a spade and expose the powers that be. Others were taken into the forest, although the editors prefer not to remember this episode. But it is completely unacceptable to use the authority of honest journalists to cover up that shop for publishing custom articles that has been operating in the publication for decades. Certainly, Shchekochikhin, Politkovskaya and Domnikov did not take envelopes from Deripaska and Smushkin, but someone took them in the nineties, in the 2000s, and continues to take them today. This is how this post-Soviet business, unthinkable for the civilized media market, works: while some are jumping under bullets to get precious exclusives, others are busily stuffing envelopes into their pockets with payments from press services for posting compromising information on competitors. As an inevitable consequence of such a division of responsibilities, one as a result taken to the forest, and others then firmly shake the kidnapper’s hand in front of the television cameras, announcing the conclusion of non-public gentleman’s agreements. At the same time, everyone calls each other colleagues, and no one even asks why neither the newspaper nor the website is trying to make money through normal media advertising.

3. Quality of fact checking

If anyone suddenly disagrees that Novaya Gazeta does not make any serious efforts to verify the authenticity of the incriminating evidence it publishes, it is not me who needs to argue about this. This assessment is contained, for example, in the decision of the Koptevsky Court on the claim of Sergei Kiriyenko, which entered into legal force. The lawsuit was related to the publication of a false letter from five American congressmen. The deception was revealed literally on the day of publication, June 28, 2004. And it could have been revealed earlier - if the newspaper had a practice of checking incriminating evidence before publication, and would have called at least one of the supposed authors of the letter (or simply Googled the origin of the stuffing, which was sewn with white thread from the very beginning, and was not confirmed by any independent source). But even after the congressmen themselves denied their involvement in the letter, Novaya Gazeta did not apologize to Kiriyenko, but preferred to defend its case in the courts. In the end, of course, she lost, and still published a refutation. But six months passed between the exposure of the fake in all Russian media and its refutation in Novaya Gazeta (December 20, 2004). And if Kiriyenko had not filed a lawsuit, then readers of the newspaper to this day would be asked to consider the fake letter as genuine, and the facts stated in it as proven beyond doubt. Anticipating another portion of kindergarten excuses about “long ago and not true,” I hasten to disappoint. Below in the text will be given a similar episode from the April (2013) practice of the newspaper.

4. Who orders the dumping of incriminating evidence?

Yulia Latynina in the latest “Access Code” talks about the scandal with leaked documentation from the BVI offshore zone: I don’t believe in any anonymous consortium of journalists who have access to emails. And in the very next phrase there is a conclusion: if the journalists did not dig it up themselves, if we do not see any Assange or Manning at the origins of the leak, then this is not a leak at all, but a purposeful, controlled leak. So let's figure out who the customer is. In my opinion, this is a completely logical way to pose the question when a suitcase of incriminating evidence of unknown origin surfaces. So I’m writing about exactly the same thing, only using material that is closer to me. For the life of me, I don’t believe that Novaya Gazeta journalist Andrei Kolesnikov, who also happens to be a badass hacker, picked up the passwords to V.Yu.’s mailboxes. Surkov and other employees of the presidential administration, but did not find anything interesting there, except for several letters discrediting Vlad Tsyplukhin and his candle factory TJournal. It seems obvious to me that there was a purposeful leak of some compromising material to Kolesnikov - with goals that were extremely far from truth-seeking. And looking at the published incriminating evidence without asking who leaked it and why seems to me like some kind of naivety on the verge of dementia. I consider the people who planted incriminating evidence on Kolesnikov as the masterminds of the information attack on the VKontakte network and its founder Pavel Durov. There is no other word to describe the organizers of this stuffing. And I don’t believe that these people took a terrible risk by giving Kolesnikov Tsyplukhin’s letter and a Word file, the authorship of which is attributed to Pavel Durov. If Novaya Gazeta categorically refuses to discuss the origin of the firewood, then this is by no means a “protection of journalistic sources” (which are not in danger, since they are on duty), but a banal conspiracy between the editors and those who ordered the attack on the obstinate social network, which has been refusing to block for a year and a half opposition communities of supporters Alexei Navalny.

5. Who framed Sergei Kanev

In the same “Access Code”, Yulia Latynina tries to support the stuffing against VKontakte with the authority of the fearless journalist Sergei Kanev, whose reputation I can supposedly discredit with references to the pulp order of 2002 (where his name does not appear). In fact, no one in Russia has done as much to discredit the journalist Kanev as the editorial board of Novaya Gazeta itself in one article dated April 2 of this year. . It refutes factual statements made in two from August and September last year: The information that M. Koryak’s acquaintance Natalya Pozdnova, according to operational data, previously “worked as a fortune teller” is speculative. Finally, they did not receive their documentary confirmation and information that M. Koryak ever presented himself as an “adviser” or “friend” of Putin, acted as a “fixer”, and also that certain killers have claims against M. Koryak and their customers, who “also became victims of his scams”.

There is no mention in the text of any court decision that forced the newspaper to publish such a refutation. That is, we are talking about another secret and amicable agreement that the editors entered into with the person involved in their denunciations, agreeing in the process to destroy the entire accusatory plot built by Sergei Kanev based on the results of his investigation. Of course, a typical six months passed between the first and second events, as in the case of Kiriyenko, and the editorial refutation took up 20 times less newspaper space than the original accusations. But, my friends, the formulation that “the facts have not received documentary confirmation” is nonsense and an oxymoron. Firstly, it turns out that Sergei Kanev is not an investigator, but a storyteller worse than Andersen. If no confirmation of his accusations was found even six months after their publication, this means that there was no such confirmation from the beginning (even in the form of someone’s “value judgment”, which frees the newspaper from responsibility for accuracy). The evidence couldn't have been dissolved retroactively, could it? It turns out that under the guise of reliable information verified by the journalist, his personal conjectures were published, and then for six months everyone waited for them to somehow prove themselves - but, unfortunately, they did not wait. Secondly, if certain information has not been confirmed either before, during, or after publication, then there is no reason to call them “facts.”

Personally, I am inclined to think that in this particular case Kanev did not invent anything, and that he had the most compelling grounds for the accusations (for example, the investigation materials). It’s just that the editors, for some, as usual, non-public reasons, entered into another gentleman’s agreement with the “victim” at the cost of discrediting the journalist. In any case, if in April 2013 someone wants to accuse Sergei Kanev of publishing false information, there is no need to rummage through the archives of the pulp wars. It is enough to point your finger at the official refutation of 04/02/2013.

[Stringer.ru, 03/18/2013, “Mikhail Koryak, put on the international wanted list, under the touching protection of Roskomnadzor”: Last year, the life of a “hero of our time,” a man named Mikhail Koryak, became public knowledge. He is from a glorious tribe who “decided”. Having escaped from the obsessive attention of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, Mikhail Koryak hired a lawyer, Oleg Rafailovich Chudnovsky, who set about an important matter - erasing information about his client. A body called Roskomnadzor took the side of lawyer Chudnovsky and his client named Mikhail Koryak. The specialists of this body are touchingly making sure that all data about this hero disappears from the pages of the media and Internet sites - Insert K.ru]

6. Where is the evidence against Durov and VKontakte?

Now let's return to our main topic. An article by Andrei Kolesnikov dated March 27 cited two documents planted by an unknown well-wisher: a letter from Pavel Durov to Surkov and an accompanying commentary by Vladislav Tsyplukhin. These materials are intended to prove that the management of VKontakte LLC is engaged in political provocations using fake communities based on the social network of the same name. I asked to somehow justify the authenticity of the two published documents (in my impression, half of the text is from real letters, and the other half was added by the customer, and the gluing line is visible to the naked eye). To this day I have not received an answer to my question about the evidence for these two documents. Instead, in publications of April 5 18 completely different letters are given in which Pavel Durov is neither the sender nor the recipient. These letters are really talking about political manipulations, only the platform on which they take place is not VKontakte, but Twitter and a certain TJournal resource. The letters published on April 5 are indeed genuine, as Tsyplukhin himself has already admitted. And they, of course, seriously compromise him. But Tsyplukhin and Durov are different people, and VKontakte and Twitter are different platforms. That Tsyplukhin once worked part-time with Kremlin PR orders for spam on Twitter, and then stopped, and for this he was roughly punished by leaking it to Novaya Gazeta, I don’t argue: that’s exactly how it all apparently happened. But the headlines of the March 27 news story featured not Tsyplukhin and Twitter, but Durov and VKontakte. The order is obviously directed against Durov and VK, and not against the retired press secretary and his uninteresting candle factory TJournal. And it is precisely this compromising evidence about “crossed traffic” and Durov’s fiery personal love for Surkov that I am asked to accept without evidence. And I'm sorry, I'm not ready. Because we saw how today in Novaya Gazeta they brush aside the orders and misinformation of the 2000s, with the motivation “This was several years ago, so let’s forget.” And in a few years, they will begin to brush aside current publications in the same way - citing the expired deadlines for challenging them.

7. Why was the incriminating evidence spread through Novaya?

The subtitle of the March 27 article itself looks like a clumsy and cynical manipulation of known facts to anyone in the subject. The form of cooperation with the FSB and Directorate “K” of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which the newspaper incriminates against Pavel Durov and the VKontakte network, is spelled out in black and white in the current Russian legislation. According to this scheme (issuance of user data in response to a formal request), not only Yandex, Rambler and Mail.Ru, but also the Californian corporation Google cooperate with Russian law enforcement agencies. which it reports directly on its website- and all other sites make no secret of such facts. I fully admit that journalist Andrei Kolesnikov did not suspect this at the time of publication. Probably for this reason, it was he who was chosen by the customers to carry out the stuffing - as a person who understands the Runet less than Californian and Hague lawyers, and therefore is able to accept a well-known fact from many years of practice SORM for lethal incriminating evidence in the spring of 2013. But if this had happened in any other editorial office, the stuff coming from the journalist would have been checked by his colleagues who understood the topic. I think that it was for this reason that the customer did not take his folder with incriminating evidence to "Kommersant" or "Vedomosti", V Lentu.Ru or Gazeta.Ru. There they would start checking it, calculating DKIM, and of course they would never make Durov’s “cooperation with the FSB” into the headlines. And Novaya Gazeta has a specific approach to checking published leaks, about which enough has been said above; I will not repeat it. I don’t see any other rational reasons for the appearance of this stuff in Novaya Gazeta.

8. VKontakte refutes

After the publication of April 5, the current press secretary of VKontakte gave comments to the Do///d TV channel. And he repeated again that the letter, the authorship of which the newspaper attributed to Pavel Durov, was a fake. “I know for sure that Durov would never write such a thing,” said Georgy Lobushkin. This is the official position of the social network and its creator today. Of course, if on the other side of the scale were the documents published by Kommersant or Vedomosti after the factual verification accepted in these publications, I could only sympathize with Lobushkin and Durov. But the credit of trust that I have in Novaya Gazeta does not extend to anonymous leaks against commercial structures. May all those worthy people who risk their lives publish real journalistic investigations in this newspaper, without envelopes with dollars and controlled leaks from the AP, forgive me.

Instead of an afterword

My suggestion from the previous note still stands. If Novaya Gazeta ever presents evidence that with the knowledge and consent of Pavel Durov, provocations were carried out on the VKontakte platform, which Andrei Kolesnikov told the world about, I will gladly publish them here. I don’t have a single reason in the world to shield VKontakte. I am neither a shareholder, nor an employee, nor even an active user of this service. I am much better acquainted with the journalists of Novaya Gazeta than with the shareholders and employees of the St. Petersburg social network.

But judging by the fact that Yulia Latynina for some reason declared me “Durov’s friend,” the question of why I even got involved in this showdown is worth answering.

I returned to Russia in 1997, and for 16 years I have been observing how the mechanisms of information assassination, custom PR, denim and manipulation of stock prices through insider leaks work in the local press. This practice has always seemed shameful to me. But, fortunately, the main budgets that it feeds on are the money of raw materials oligarchs dividing industrial assets, government officials, dishonest security officials and stock exchange speculators. Until very recently, the Internet market seemed too insignificant to this public, so the formation of our industry somehow did without this shit. How did it manage without bandits, protection rackets, share ministers, kickbacks, raids, kidnappings and custom tax audits.

And now some people for whom waging black PR wars is a common activity have decided to take this club to the Internet. And it doesn’t really matter to me who these scoundrels are: they are Volodin’s, Surkov’s, Malofeev’s, or someone else’s. In any case, I don’t want them to drag this shit of theirs into the Runet. The Unified Register and criminal cases against bloggers are enough for me.

Novaya Gazeta is a product of the 1990s, and its mentality has not changed since that heroic time. This newsroom does not understand the extent to which the Internet has changed the rules of the game in the field of investigative journalism. At Novaya they work the old fashioned way. The stuffing of letters from Andrei Kolesnikov is an exact repetition of the 2004 story about the “letter from American congressmen.” And we live in an era WikiLeaks and Alexei Navalny. First rule Pehting- any allegations must be proven beyond doubt before we begin to discuss them.

Of course, this is an awkward situation for whistleblowers. Navalny cannot come to an agreement with Pekhtin and withdraw his charges. Bastrykinsky business in the Czech Republic will not disappear with the same ease with which all Novaya Gazeta’s claims against this figure were resolved behind closed doors. Astakhov's stolen dissertation will not be original. Because in 2013, you must first present evidence to the independent public, and only then bring charges. And these charges cannot later be taken back by gentlemen's agreement. The fact that Novaya Gazeta does not understand this should remain the problem of Novaya Gazeta, and not of those who are being killed in it by order, commercial or political.

Read news from Astrakhan and the Astrakhan region about Fact and dirt, as well as containing mention of Fact and compromising evidence. We do not just collect and store all the news from Astrakhan and the Astrakhan region. We also teach our robot to constantly sort them into various categories and events. In particular, we noticed that some news often refers to Fact and Compromising Material. Our robot specially sorted such news according to this criterion, so that it is always convenient for you to find them.
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The Federation Council is looking for a solution to the problem of publishing leaks on the Internet. "Experienced under February 5th, 2008

based on materials
© "Gazeta.Ru",
02/11/2008, Photo: ITAR-TASS

Legislative blockage

Svetlana Bocharova

Senators have come up with a new measure to control the Internet. The Federation Council has prepared a document that will require website owners to compulsorily register a resource as a media outlet if its audience exceeds 1 thousand people. Experts doubt that the proposal can be implemented in practice.

Another legislative initiative designed to regulate the functioning of the Internet became known on Monday. Senator from Chuvashia Vladimir Slutsker considered that in order to solve the problem of publishing “leaks” and slander on the Internet, the law “On Mass Media” should be extended to online publications. According to him, “the key amendment to the law should be the provision on mandatory
registration of Internet sites with an audience of at least 1 thousand visits per day. This corresponds to Article 12 of the Law “On Mass Media”, where print media with a circulation of 1 thousand copies and above are subject to mandatory registration.”

In addition, according to Slutsker, a rule should be introduced into the law “On the Mass Media” allowing the press to refer only to Internet resources that have passed state registration.

“Article 57 (Law on Mass Media) today exempts media from liability for publishing defamatory and unreliable data if this data is a verbatim reproduction of messages and materials disseminated by another media outlet. This provision opens a loophole in the legislation for unscrupulous journalists and publications who can reprint any disinformation from the Internet and not bear any responsibility for it,” Slutsker argued his proposal in a conversation with an Interfax correspondent.

Let us recall that earlier Slutsker initiated the initiation of a criminal case against journalist Oleg Lurie, allegedly
who extorted from him and his wife, Olga Slutsker, CEO of the World Class Club network of training halls, large sums for blocking the publication of compromising materials. Currently, Lurie, who has been placed in custody, has been charged with extortion and fraud (Article 163 and Article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). According to investigators, Lurie not only blackmailed the Slutskers, but also put his threats into practice by publishing incriminating evidence on “profile” websites.

The experience (and even before the incident with Lurie, many stories appeared on the Internet about the affairs of the Slutsker couple
impartial publications) prompted the senator, who heads the joint commission on national policy and relations between the state and religious associations under the Federation Council, to legislate. In his own words, a number of State Duma deputies have already expressed a desire to join his initiative, “many of whom were directly affected by defamation and slander spread with impunity through the Internet.”

As reported by Gazeta. Ru,” senator’s press secretary Ekaterina Shatalina, “the bill has not yet been finalized, its developers are currently consulting with experts.” The document prepared for submission to the State Duma will be considered at a special meeting by a joint commission of the upper chamber.

Interlocutor of “Newspapers. Ru noted that the upcoming bill does not pursue the goal of “regulating the entire Internet.”

In particular, the blogosphere, forums and other popular network resources that are not online publications are not supposed to be brought under the law “On Mass Media”.

“Currently, our lawyers are working on a definition of an online publication that will allow us to separate blogs, forums, dating sites and other resources from those that function as media, but are not called that, defining themselves, for example, as “home libraries” etc.,” said Shatalina. Slutsker, according to his press secretary, set as his goal exclusively the fight against such negative phenomena as the publication of “leaks” and compromising evidence. Shatalina recalled that the Commission on Information Policy of the Federation Council under the leadership of Lyudmila Narusova continues to work on the global law “On the Internet”.

Nevertheless, the Internet perceived Slutsker’s initiative as an attack on the entire established order. In particular, the famous blogger Alex Exler wrote in his LiveJournal that “the regulation of the Internet, which the Bolsheviks have long been talking about, is gaining momentum.” “1 thousand users per day at the current stage of Internet development is the level of visits to very, very mediocre resources and blogs,” he noted. At the same time, bloggers are asking the question, “what will the authorities do with anonymous publications that are hosted abroad and wanted to blame all these deputies with large hair in their hair?” “I think that they will come up with restricting access to such publications - that may be enough for them. But even without this, such laws will not lead to anything good. Especially considering the emerging practice of punishing hosters for sites hosted by them and forum owners for messages posted on the forum,” the users conclude.

Director of the blog service at SUP Anton Nosik is confident that for now the Internet community has nothing to fear. “Since it is not clear that anyone has seriously gone through the procedure to turn this fantasy into law, and knowing how this happens in our country, we have to conclude that there is no sympathy in the Kremlin for this initiative. And when the Kremlin does not push forward any ideas, individual enthusiasts who decided to leave their “crimson” mark on lawmaking are doomed to failure,” Nosik told Gazeta.Ru. According to him, the amendments are quite understandable.

“From time to time, a legislator who finds himself in an unpleasant situation with competitors in his business, which he supposedly is no longer involved in, discovers that his competitors are using the Internet to fight him. And the first thing he thinks: we need to ban the platform where all this is happening,” Nosik explained Slutsker’s motives.

“If suddenly the opinion about the Internet in the Kremlin changes, then the same parsley will follow a completely different scenario: it will be framed not as an initiative of one parliamentarian, but as a proposal to the State Duma of the Russian government. That is, they will be completely different people with a completely different level of support,” Nosik added.

The newspaper, controlled by Kazakh businessman Vladimir Kim, discredits Russian investors in the interests of the Makhmakhanov brothers

Any scandal that happens in the socio-political life of Kazakhstan is considered by local media from various points of view: political, economic, legal, ethical, and finally. Each newspaper has its own specifics - they are left and right, liberal and conservative. And there is also the frantic Socio-Political Newspaper “Vremya”. OCG "Time", in other words. Perhaps the fighting spirit here remains from the times when the newspaper was an unknown police circulation and fiercely denounced alcoholics and parasites. From there the odiousness and bias remained.

Russian and Kazakh - brothers forever

The Kazakh group KAZ Minerals claims a controlling stake in the development project of the Baimskoye copper deposit, owned by the Millhouse company Roman Abramovich. On the Russian side, Norilsk Nickel intends to become the majority shareholder of a promising ore site with resources of about 23 million tons of copper. Vladimir Potanin. The main shareholder of KAZ Minerals is the richest man in Kazakhstan - Vladimir Kim, an ethnic Korean and former Komsomol worker living in London, where he lobbies for the shadow interests of the Kazakh elite, effectively managing illegal financial flows. On the contrary, in Kazakhstan, Kim is actively promoting British capital, placing English “Varangians” in key positions in the Republic of Kazakhstan.

His broad interests also include a number of media outlets, including the Socio-Political Newspaper “Vremya”, not to be confused with the London “The Times”, whose role in the lives of investors can hardly be overestimated. The organized crime group "Vremya" became famous for its incredible resourcefulness in protecting its masters and ignoring the norms of law, morality and journalistic ethics. But more on that later.

The clash of Russian and Kazakh interests in Chukotka fits well into the “multi-vector” nature of Kazakhstan, which is trying to hug its “big Russian brother” with one hand until it chokes, and with the other it is waving invitingly to the Anglo-American guests. And, while Astana officially constantly declares its commitment to the ideals of the EAEU, individual national companies and local business representatives openly lobby for the promotion of Western corporations. In the leadership of almost every strategic holding in the Republic of Kazakhstan there is a foreigner who defends the interests of the West.

For example, soon Kazakhstan’s air fleet, in addition to three Boeing 787 Dreamliners, will be replenished with six more Boeing 737 MAX 8 airliners. And the KTZ-Freight Transportation company will purchase shunting diesel locomotives worth almost $900 million from the American General Electric Kazakhstan. Russian aircraft and diesel locomotive manufacturers modestly passed by such a tasty morsel of several billion dollars.

Kazakh mousetrap with expensive cheese

I would like to remind you that the EAEU was created, among other things, for the purpose of jointly opposing the expansion of Western capital. The cooperation of the countries of the former USSR was directed not against foreign investment, but against the seizure of strategic national assets and subsequent pressure on the CIS countries. Nursultan Nazarbaev, the President of Kazakhstan, as the author of the idea of ​​a new economic union, is very sensitive to such cooperation, without forgetting, however, about attracting Western investors to the republic. Advertising the Republic of Kazakhstan as a reliable partner goes on a broad front from Australia to Alaska. In July 2018, the opening of the Astana International Financial Center is due to take place, which may become a hub for financial flows throughout the Central Asian region. The search for foreign investment has become one of the vectors of the state in Kazakhstan. And that's okay.

What happens to investors later is not entirely normal. A certain “dark force” comes into play, which professionally and with impunity is engaged in robbing investors, under the guise of national interests, which, of course, are above all. That is, first, a promising “rich Pinocchio” is lured into the country, who invests money in a super-profitable project, and then it turns out that his desire to earn money and return the investment is contrary to Kazakh laws. Sometimes such a show is even carried out under verbal or written government guarantees, which later turn out to be “criminal acts” of unscrupulous officials. Civil servants then fall into temporary disgrace, and the robbed investor tries in vain to achieve the truth in local courts.

Moldovans, Russians, Germans and other victims

The most famous conflict between an investor and the state in Kazakhstan is the “Stati case”. Back in 1999, Tristan Oil Ltd, founded Anatol Stati, acquired majority stakes in two oil companies in Kazakhstan: Tolkynneftegaz and Kazpolmunai, which began to bring good profits to the Moldovan. But in 2008, unexpectedly, a conflict arose between the Stati and the authorities of the Republic of Kazakhstan - both companies were accused of violating tax laws. Moreover, the violations were many years old, but they were allegedly not noticed before. A Moldovan businessman decided to sue the government of the republic. The statement of claim alleged that the actions of the Kazakh side forced Tristan Oil to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on illegal tax payments and fines and led to the seizure of fields in 2010.

After lengthy proceedings, in 2014, an international tribunal under the auspices of the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce ordered Kazakhstan to pay about 500 million US dollars to the structures of Anatol Stati for “violation of the Energy Charter Treaty and loss of investment.” The Stockholm Court of Appeal at the end of 2016 upheld this decision of the Arbitration Court, recognizing that “Kazakhstan violated international law by refusing to recognize the plaintiff’s investments as fair and equitable.”

Kazakh officials took this lightly and, calling Stati “a swindler and a swindler,” began to habitually delay the matter. But unexpectedly, in December 2017, New York Mellon Bank froze the funds of the National Fund of Kazakhstan for $22 billion according to the claim of a defrauded Moldovan investor. This unpleasant news became the reason for the traditional search for “culprit officials” in Kazakh government agencies. But before the culprits had time to go to jail, the Dutch court granted the request of the National Bank of Kazakhstan “to lift the seizure of the assets of the National Fund held in custodial storage at the New York Mellon Bank.” The scales of justice have swung in the opposite direction, but the punishing sword of the law still hangs over the financial assets of the republic.

Another “conflict of interest” occurred in Kazakhstan with Russian businessmen Sutyaginsky, owners of the Omsk group of companies “Titan”. Over the course of several years, they built and launched a number of production facilities in various regions of the republic. Two enterprises - the Silicium Kazakhstan metallurgical silicon production plant and the Biokhim plant - were opened by President Nazarbayev himself. The plants were recognized as “breakthrough projects of the Republic of Kazakhstan.” Despite their export orientation, the production facilities created by the Sutyaginskys were strategic for Russia and the Republic of Kazakhstan, and made it possible to completely eliminate dependence on imported products. But, as in the Stati case, a “political” factor suddenly appeared: project participants, banks with state participation - the Development Bank of Kazakhstan (DBK) and BTA Bank demanded early repayment of loans, citing the low profitability of the enterprises as the reason for this decision. Moreover, before this decision, the factories, at someone’s command, were “attacked” by local officials, who created problems with water supply and electricity, under the pretext of “well, that’s how it happened.” Result: both factories were taken away from the investor allegedly for debts, and then, through simple legal manipulations, they were transferred under the control of JSC National Welfare Fund Samruk-Kazyna, i.e. nationalized. But, as the investigation and the court later established, such a transfer of assets was preceded by a scandalous attempt by a group of raiders to seize enterprises, using forged documents and local administrative resources. The failed raiders were convicted, and the production sites were handed over to the state in a dilapidated state. The Biokhim plant has been idle for 6 years, although annual reports about its launch do not leave the pages of the local press. Today it is known that the head of the Titan Group of Companies, Mikhail Sutyaginsky, is not giving up attempts to return the factories or investments, which is legal and normal in the current situation. At least that's what he's talking about.

For the third year, German citizen Günter Papenburg, who is the honorary consul of Kazakhstan in Hannover, has been trying to get the return of his 10 million euros that he invested in Kazakhstan. A construction company that was close to bankruptcy was sold to a naive German for this money. The trial between Papenburg and K-Dorstroy JSC began in 2015: Guenter Papenburg AG filed a lawsuit against K-Dorstroy to invalidate the purchase and sale agreement for K-Dorstroy shares and to reimburse the amount paid in the amount of 10 million euros . Lawyers for GP Guenter Papenburg AG claim that the company's management was misled regarding the financial position of K-Dorstroy JSC. Papenburg himself constantly emphasizes in media interviews that the protection of the interests of foreign investors in Kazakhstan is close to zero.

In 2016, the Canadian Arbitration Tribunal considered and satisfied the claim of the Canadian mining company World Wide Minerals Ltd against Kazakhstan. In 1996-1997 the company has invested several billion dollars in developing the largest uranium reserves in Kazakhstan. But then government agencies began to violate the terms of the agreements and began to put bureaucratic obstacles in the company’s activities, as a result of which its activities stopped and the company went bankrupt. Confiscation of property followed, after which its assets were sold by the government of Kazakhstan.

In the spring of 2016, the French oil company Total abandoned its long-term participation in the development of the Zhenis field. Later, the American ConocoPhillips withdrew from the Kashagan project and was about to completely leave the Kazakh oil market by selling its share in the shelf project. Investors stated that the new law of the Republic of Kazakhstan “On Subsoil Use” does not contain legal guarantees to protect their interests. In their opinion, in Kazakhstan “political risks around oil projects have increased noticeably, as the authorities are politicizing the process of concluding oil contracts.”

But none of these monumental investment failures made it to the pages of the Vremya newspaper. In addition to the scandals associated with the names of Stati and Sutyaginsky.

OCG "Vremya" guards private interests

Naturally, scandals of such magnitude are widely covered in the press of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The media considers them from various points of view: political, economic, legal, ethical, etc. But not a single information resource does this with such hatred as the Vremya organized crime group. Perhaps the fighting spirit remained from those times when the newspaper was an unknown police circulation and fiercely stigmatized alcoholics and parasites. The tendentious presentation of material constantly haunts the cases of Stati and Sutyaginsky, this is evidenced not only by the huge number of articles, but also by the creation of regular columns on these topics. The newspaper “Vremya” is also concerned about the matter Mukhtar Ablyazova, the fate of the former prime minister Serika Akhmetova and , but here she speaks from the position of proven officialdom, without deviating from the “general” line of Astana. But the high-profile case of Vladimir Ni, who was caught red-handed while receiving 1 million US dollars as a bribe, did not arouse keen interest in the publication. And everyone understands why.

But, once upon a time, the organized crime group “Vremya” was considered almost the mouthpiece of the opposition movement “Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan”. The crooked path from a police newspaper and an opposition media outlet ultimately brought Vremya into the hands of its current owners, whose names even the publication’s former editor-in-chief Marat Asipov refused to name, who was replaced in 2012 by a reliable and proven political officer Lev Tartakov, a graduate of the Kyiv Higher Military -Naval Political School, former officer of the Northern Fleet. Over the years, he worked in senior positions in the Ministry of Press and Mass Information and the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies under the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

But journalists know that the actual owner of the Vremya organized crime group is one of the richest people in Kazakhstan - Vladimir Kim, president of Kazakhmys Holding and a major shareholder of the KAZ Minerals Group, which is now laying claim to a controlling stake in the Baimskoye copper deposit in Chukotka. This is where the genuine interest of the Vremya organized crime group comes from in everything related to the subsoil - from Stati oil to silicon and biotechnologies of the Sutyaginskys. When you work only in the interests of one owner, there is no time for objectivity and tolerance.

Flint Sutyaginsky and the swindlers around

In the Kazakh “Sutyaginsky Case,” what is frankly surprising is the ability of both brothers, Alexander and Mikhail Sutyaginsky, to gather people around themselves, who will then not only betray and rob, but also frame them, bringing them under criminal prosecution. But upon careful study of these people, it becomes clear that they were introduced into the Sutyaginsky team not for work, but for other purposes, and clearly carried out the commands of the “dark force” mentioned above. This is how the brothers acted back in the recent nineties, when they needed to quickly squeeze out someone else’s business. Army "friend" Mikhail Garkushkin For a long time he hatched a plan to seize all the property of the Sutyaginskys in Kazakhstan, until he enlisted the support of lawyers - Pesterev, Kim and Nikolaeva. Then, with the help of a fraudulent bodyguard, Andrievsky, he organized an assassination attempt on himself, accusing Alexander Sutyaginsky of this, and at the same time tried, using false documents, to seize the Silicium Kazakhstan and Biokhim plants, owned by the brothers.

However, the “brilliant” combination of the former traffic cop ended in a natural way: Garkushkin, lawyers and the bodyguard were put on trial under the articles “Raiding” and “Fraud”, were convicted and received prison sentences. But the Vremya organized crime group, of course, kept silent about this. The newspaper did not mention those who provided the raiders with administrative resources and support in law enforcement agencies and the courts.

The charges against Alexander Sutyaginsky actually fell apart in court and he still managed to break free. Biased coverage of the Sutyaginsky Case does not bring honor to the Vremya organized crime group. On the pages of the newspaper, despite the decisions of the court, all those legally convicted look like “innocent victims” at the hands of the insidious Sutyaginskys. Reading these articles, you understand that the lie sold 130,000 copies, and there was only one refutation - a court decision.

Realizing that one cannot endlessly lie about the same topic (the reader will get bored), the Vremya organized crime group decided to finally “drown” the Sutyaginskys by connecting them with the odious Mukhtar Ablyazov, so that they would not even dream of returning their investments. Politically, it seems to be a very competent, but extremely primitive move: today in Kazakhstan the worst sin is a connection with the disgraced oligarch Ablyazov. Communication with Ablyazov, according to propagandists, automatically makes anyone an “enemy of the people.” President Nazarbayev dreams of seeing him in prison on a bunk, and accordingly, the whole of Kazakhstan dreams of this. But even the wild imagination of the Vremya newspaper could not “find” real facts of cooperation between the Sutyaginskys and Ablyazov. In the absence of reality, the organized crime group moved into surreality by publishing, which told how he helped the Sutyaginskys with a loan from Ablyazov’s BTA Bank. And again, the Vremya newspaper, in someone’s interests, makes a “hero” out of an anti-hero - in an interview, Tretyakov modestly kept silent about the fact that in Russia he was accused of embezzling more than 1.6 billion rubles from the Titan group of companies and is on the international wanted list. Together with him, another participant in the case of Alexander Sutyaginsky, a certain Vladimir Belokon, is running from investigators. The Kazakh newspaper has a very strange set of “positive” characters - they are all participants in dark criminal cases, convicted under criminal charges or still hiding from justice.

"Time" works for the Makhmakhanovs

The hysterical and unscrupulous defense of the “honor” of the raider Garkushkin suggests the existence of close ties between the Vremya organized crime group and the Makhnovtsy organized crime group. Makhmakhanov clan well known in Kazakhstan and Russia for criminal affairs and corrupt connections with officials. “Vremya” has already provided its resources to justify the activities of the Chechen organized crime group after the well-known events in Malovodny, when indignant Kazakhs killed three Makhmakhanov brothers. This happened immediately after the reprisal against the Kazakh authority Saga because of his alleged conflict with the leadership of Kazakhmys, which was controlled at that time by the “Koreans.” Therefore, it is not surprising that when Mikhail Garkushkin’s 3.5 year real sentence was replaced with a suspended one, Shamil Makhmakhanov personally congratulated him on his release right in the courtroom. The Vremya newspaper, covering in detail the entire process from the position of justifying the raiders, for some reason bashfully did not mention this fact. The Vremya newspaper also forgot about the cash-out case in which Mikhail Garkushkin’s companies were involved. This case also turned out to be closed, obviously not without the notorious administrative resources. One must think that the “cash out” took place in the interests of the same Makhmakhanov clan and its curators, who constantly need cash, given their huge contribution to the corruption component of the Republic of Kazakhstan. In addition, the Makhmakhanovs’ organized crime group is suspected of a number of high-profile contract killings of both officials and journalists who dared to write about individual cases of the organized crime group and their patrons from the Korean diaspora. For some reason, the Makhmakhanov family always has a lot of weapons, which “pop up” at the most inopportune moment: in their house in the village of Malovodnoye, the police discovered a whole arsenal of unregistered weapons, including a Kalashnikov assault rifle, then it turned out that the TT pistol with which Tahir Makhmakhanov was killed two Kazakhs, in 2002 it was already used in the murder of the deputy chairman of Gosstandart of the Republic of Kazakhstan Nurlan Turysov and his wife. Also, the name of the Makhmakhanovs came up during the contract killing in December 2013 in Petropavlovsk of the deputy head of the Financial Police Department of the North Kazakhstan region of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Zhandos Akhmetov. No one is surprised by rumors that Shamil Makhmakhanov is an intermediary in the “ordering” of killers in the Republic of Kazakhstan and the Russian Federation. There are suspicions that he took part in hiring a killer in the murder of the owner of the “Party” stores in Korolev, near Moscow. A “law-abiding” family whose members were either killed under criminal circumstances or are on the international wanted list for committing serious crimes looks strange.

In Kazakhstan, it is no secret to anyone that Mikhail Garkushkin, like other heroes of publications whom the Vremya newspaper so diligently defends, are in fact members of the Makhmakhanov clan and constantly appear in its affairs. So Garkushkin’s son, Grigory, ended up in St. Petersburg, helping the clan manage the Pulkovo-3 Shopping and Entertainment Center, which unexpectedly came under the control of the Makhnovists after the high-profile contract murder of its former owner, Mikhail Karachev. Shamil Makhmakhanov himself and the fugitive witness Vladimir Belokon also appeared in this case, as stated by numerous eyewitnesses, including the widow of the murdered businessman.

How many interesting things can be revealed if you supplement the articles of the Socio-Political Newspaper “Vremya” with reliable information about which it was silent, naturally in the interests of Kazakhstan. As Kozma Prutkov said: “A narrow specialist is like gumboil - his completeness is one-sided.” Who benefits from this “flux” in Russian-Kazakh relations?