The specifics of the legal case against Russian Deputy Minister of Transport Vladimir Tokarev, who has been accused of stealing 523 million rubles, were disclosed when Khoroshevsky District Court of Moscow arrested him last Friday.
Police investigators believe that if the official, who holds residency in the Czech Republic and has assets there, is released on bail or placed under house arrest, he will flee abroad and use connections in government to obstruct the investigation.
Vladimir Tokarev was brought to court from the ITT near Komsomolskaya Square, where he had been since Wednesday. After reviewing the materials of the arrest case, the official’s defense filed a motion to hold hearings closed to the media, arguing that non-public information about the identity of the accused, including his illnesses, could be disclosed during the trial. The investigator was only in favor, since he also had something to hide from journalists – the details of both the crime itself, which the official was charged with, and information about its alleged participants.
Despite this, it was revealed that the investigator from the transport department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for the Central Federal District, seeking the arrest of Mr. Tokarev before March 18, not only mentioned the accusation of a serious crime (fraud of an especially large scale with a punishment of up to ten years) but also stated that the Deputy Minister has a residence permit and real estate in the Czech Republic, where he may seek refuge. To pressure the investigation, according to his representative, the official may use connections in the power structures.
Mr. Tokarev denied involvement in the theft and expressed readiness to cooperate with the investigation. His defense proposed bail or, as an alternative, house arrest. Following a three-hour trial, Mr. Tokarev returned to the temporary detention center and is expected to be transferred to prison soon.
According to the investigation, he committed the alleged crime before joining the civil service while serving as the first deputy director of Spetstransstroy LLC. The estimated damage is 523 million rubles.
The fraud case centers around a project for comprehensive railway reconstruction at the Maxim Gorky-Kotelnikovo-Tikhoretskaya-Krymskaya section. RZDstroy JSC (a subsidiary of Russian Railways JSC) was the project customer, and Spetstransstroy LLC, where Mr. Tokarev worked as Deputy General Director from 2016 to 2018, was one of the contractors. The project ran from 2007 to 2018 in various Russian regions, with 130 billion rubles invested. After completing stages of construction, road restoration was needed, including in the Timashevsky and Korenovsky districts of the Krasnodar Territory. According to investigators, the management of Spetstransstroy LLC devised a scheme to illegally withdraw customer funds while working on these road sections, including using misrepresented documentation for the purchase of building materials and transporting them over long distances. The investigation also suspects that substandard materials were used during construction, not meeting the contract specifications.
The second defendant in the criminal case on fraud is Levan Goglidze, who served as deputy director of production at Spetstransstroy LLC. He was taken into custody in November last year.
As it became known to Kommersant, Levan Goglidze does not plead guilty and claims that he was not involved in concluding contracts and distributing funds, but was only responsible for the construction process, Dmitry Baykov, defendant’s defender, explained to Kommersant.
In addition to Levan Goglidze and Vladimir Tokarev, unidentified persons appear in the criminal case. According to Kommersant, Yury Reylyan, the former founder of Spetstransstroy LLC and the former deputy head of the Ministry of Construction of the Russian Federation, who was arrested for other theft in Irkutsk, is being checked for involvement in the crime.
Major financial violations committed during the implementation of the project for the reconstruction of the railway on the section named after Maxim Gorky-Kotelnikovo-Tikhoretskaya-Krymskaya first became known in August 2020, the FSB of Russia in the Krasnodar Territory reported that the damage to the federal budget and Russian Railways is estimated at 1 .5 billion rubles
