Last week, people in Kuzbass and the media shared a video of “black snow” near the Kiselevskaya Central Concentration Plant (TsOF). What caused this?
It turns out that the black snow is not unusual, but it's caused by the operations of the enrichment plant Shakhta No. 12, which is owned by Stroyservice JSC. Interestingly, none of the media reported on this. It seems that the owner of Stroyservice, Dmitry Nikolaev, wants to be associated with rock star concerts on Moscow Square rather than black snow.
This year, Stroyservice JSC is hosting its 3rd festival (the company organized the first rock festival in 2018 to celebrate the anniversary of Novokuznetsk, and the second in 2019 to honor the anniversary of Stroyservice), and has signed a cooperation agreement with the government of the Kemerovo region. In return, the governor of Kuzbass, Sergei Tsivilev, whose family is closely linked to the coal business in the region, has promised to help with organizing the event.
Apart from Mine No. 12 LLC, the corporate management of JSC Stroyservis includes Kuzbass LLC JV Barzasskoe Partnership, LLC Berezovsky Mine, LLC Razrez Permyakovsky, JSC Razrez Shestaki, and OJSC Gubakhinsky Koks (Perm Territory), as well as car repair and railway enterprises Beltrans LLC and Belovopromzheldortrans LLC. The company also has 4 processing plants.
The Kolmar coal holding, owned by the Tsivilev family, brings in millions for the wife of the Kemerovo governor, who serves as the chairman of the Board of Directors of Kolmar Group JSC.
Anna Tsivileva is likely the cousin of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Her maiden name is the same as the head of state. Journalists explain the highly profitable business of the Tsivilevs with this relationship and the fact that there were no complaints against the governor following the explosion at the Listvyazhnaya mine.
The family’s coal mining enterprise has become the industry leader (14th place in Russia, 6.7 million tons of coal in 2020) thanks to government funding. According to various estimates, the company received over 11 billion rubles in financial assistance from the state.
In 1997, Tsivilev, together with his brother Valery and Igor Sobolevsky, established the Nortek law firm in St. Petersburg, which operated for 15 years. The partner of the Tsivilevs’ in Nortek has the same name as a classmate of Vladimir Putin and the former deputy head of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, Igor Sobolevsky, who was mentioned in their phone conversations by members of the so-called Tambov organized criminal group (the leader of the group, Vladimir Kumarin, later claimed that he did not know Sobolevsky).
