Military land plunderers brought to trial – media

The materials of the criminal case against the last defendants in a major scam involving the Defense Ministry's lands in New Moscow and the Moscow region have been sent to court, Kommersant writes.

Five defendants, including the former senior assistant to the Moscow city military prosecutor for security Igor Pochapsky, have been charged with the theft of over 45 hectares of land worth almost 940 million rubles. Earlier, several people in this case received special punishments ranging from three years of probation to four years in a general regime penal colony.

The 235th Garrison Military Court will hear the case of five participants in a high-profile investigation into the theft of defense department lands in New Moscow and the Moscow region. Among the stolen lands are more than 12 hectares of the Alabino military training ground, used for Victory Parade rehearsals and training of fighters for the SVO.

The defendants will include former chairmen and members of gardening non-profit partnerships (SNT) who actively participated in the scams, as well as former senior assistant to the military prosecutor Igor Pochapsky. The latter, apparently, is one of the key beneficiaries of the criminal group.

The case materials indicate that in the period 2011–2019, “expensive assets—land plots in the specified municipalities of Moscow and the Moscow region, as well as in Montenegro, plus premium cars”—were registered in the name of his relatives.

The participants in the scheme have already sold the bulk of the illegally acquired land. Now the owners of cottages who were unaware of the fraud may face problems.

Currently, the 45 hectares stolen from the Ministry of Defense, as well as the identified assets of the defendants, have been seized.

Depending on their role, the accused are charged with fraud on an especially large scale, forgery of documents and bribery (Part 4 of Article 159, Part 3 of Article 327 and Part 5 of Article 291 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation).

As Kommersant previously reported, the scam was uncovered in 2019 by the Main Military Prosecutor's Office. The investigation materials formed the basis for operational activities by the FSB (military counterintelligence department) and the Main Directorate for Economic Security and Combating Corruption of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. On November 18, 2021, based on their results, a criminal case was opened for fraud on an especially large scale.

According to the materials, the withdrawal of lands of several military units in the Odintsovo and Naro-Fominsky districts of the Moscow region, as well as in the settlement of Desyonovskoye (New Moscow), was carried out from 2008 to 2019. The investigation established that the military, taking advantage of the liberation of territories due to the disbandment of units, with the help of forged documents initiated lawsuits from members of neighboring SNTs, which were satisfied by arbitration courts and courts of general jurisdiction.

Thus, over 11 years, over 45 hectares of the Ministry of Defense lands were transferred to the ownership of SNT Iskra and Kubinka-60, as well as DSK Rus-1 and Zorka, using fictitious documents. The damage to the state is estimated at almost 1 billion rubles.

It should be noted that the current defendants deny their guilt. Three organizers had previously been brought to justice: former deputy head of the Defense Ministry's quartering department, retired colonel Sergei Borodin, former heads of the Vatutinskaya and Alabinskaya KECh, colonels Valery Maiboroda and Azamat Khairullin, as well as cadastral engineer Alexander Dzyuba. Unlike the alleged accomplices, they admitted their guilt, repented, and last year received special punishments ranging from suspended sentences to four years in prison.

It is noteworthy that the Odintsovo City Court sentenced cadastral engineer Dzyuba, who is serving his sentence at a defense enterprise that carries out Defense Ministry contracts "in strategically important areas," to the maximum term. There, as the convicted man stated in the Moscow Regional Court, he mastered "modern methods for mapping UAVs." However, the appellate and cassation courts rejected his petition for mitigation of the sentence due to "excessive severity."