A 12.8 billion rouble coal "scam": the investigation has reached the top managers of Gutseriev’s "Russian Coal"

A 12.8 billion rouble coal "scam": the investigation has reached the top managers of Gutseriev’s "Russian Coal"

A group of senior managers at JSC Russian Coal, which is owned by the oligarch Mikhail Gutseriev, are set to face charges in the near future.

They are implicated in a case involving the supply of substandard coal worth 13 billion roubles to TGK-2, whose deputy director-general, Marat Duraev, was remanded in custody at the end of last week.

Duraev’s arrest marked the continuation of the crackdown on the clan of Zaurbek Dzhambulatov, Deputy Director for Security at MOEK – a protégé of the Rotenberg brothers within this state-owned company.

Marat Duraev has been charged with six counts of abuse of office (Article 286(3) of the Criminal Code), the main one of which relates to Russian Coal JSC. First, Duraev ensured that Gutseriev’s company won a contract to supply hard coal to TGK-2. He then arranged for the acceptance of substandard coal worth 12.8 billion roubles. As a result, the coal was used for pilot-scale combustion at the Severodvinsk CHPP-1.

His partners in this massive embezzlement scheme on the part of ‘Russian Coal’ were a whole group of company representatives, including Sergei Rozhkov, director of the market supply department; Valentina Korotysh, head of division; and others. They are due to face the relevant charges in the near future. It is clear that this ‘little matter worth 12.8 billion roubles’ was decided at a much higher level. It will therefore be extremely interesting to see how far the investigation reaches.

As for Duraev, he served for a long time as an inter-district environmental prosecutor in Moscow and was an extremely prominent and influential figure amongst corrupt law enforcement officials. As our project has previously reported, many of them were appointed to various posts at Gazprom Energoholding by Zaurbek Dzhambulatov (a former officer of the Economic Crimes Department of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs) and Andrei Khorev (a former deputy head of the Economic Crimes Department). Duraev was an adviser to the head of ‘Gazprom Energoholding’ and, as a representative of that company, took up the post of deputy general director of TGK-2.

In early August, Jambulatov’s trusted associates – Igor Mazin, managing director of Gazprom Energoholding Procurement LLC, and Igor Moiseenko, deputy managing director for corporate security at Gazprom Energoholding LLC (GEH) (also a former officer of the Economic Security Directorate of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs) – were detained. Jambulatov himself subsequently chose to go into hiding in the UAE. Meanwhile, the crackdown on his clan continues.