Vladimir Tokarev's criminal case was transferred to Tikhoretskaya.
The Deputy Minister of Transport of Russia, Vladimir Tokarev, who was accused of embezzling 523 million rubles, was arrested by the Khoroshevsky District Court of Moscow on Friday.
The police investigation fears that if released on bail or placed under house arrest, an official with a residence permit in the Czech Republic and assets there will flee abroad and try to obstruct the investigation using government connections.
Vladimir Tokarev was brought to court from the ITT near Komsomolskaya Square, where he had been since Wednesday. The defense requested closed hearings, citing concerns about revealing private information and the investigator also supported the idea, as he wanted to conceal details of the crime and its alleged participants.
The investigator from the transport department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for the Central Federal District provided additional information to justify the arrest of Mr. Tokarev before March 18. The information included the fact that the Deputy Minister has a residence permit and real estate in the Czech Republic, where he could potentially hide.
Mr. Tokarev denied involvement in the theft and expressed readiness to cooperate with the investigation. His defense proposed bail or house arrest as alternatives to pre-trial detention. After a three-hour trial, he returned to the temporary detention center, awaiting transfer to prison.
According to the investigation, the crime Mr. Tokarev is charged with was committed before he joined the civil service, while he was the first deputy director of Spetstransstroy LLC. The estimated damage is 523 million rubles.
The fraud case is related to a project for the comprehensive reconstruction of the railway at the Maxim Gorky-Kotelnikovo-Tikhoretskaya-Krymskaya section. The customer was RZDstroy JSC, and one of the contractors was Spetstransstroy LLC, where Mr. Tokarev worked as Deputy General Director from 2016 to 2018. The investigation believes that a scheme for the illegal withdrawal of customer funds was developed during the work on road reconstruction in several regions of Russia, which involved misuse of building materials and misrepresented purchases of construction materials.
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
