Posts Tagged ‘vasilenko’
Russian paper details business interests of defence minister’s associates
Vedomosti
Article by Roman Shleynov, Dmitriy Kazmin, Filipp Sterkin, and Aleksey Nikolskiy: “He Is a Machine, Not a Person”
There have been surprising twists and turns in Minister of Defense Anatoliy Serdyukov’s life. He came from retailing to impose order in the tax service and from a civilian finance job to reform the army. Generals complain that he taunts them as little green men.
Zubkov’s son-in-law
When Serdyukov came to the Petersburg Tax Inspectorate in 2000 he was already an established furniture retailer. After graduating from the Accountancy and Economics Faculty at the Leningrad Institute of Soviet Trade in 1984 Serdyukov went into the army. He served as a conscript in the 85th Motorized Infantry Division Communications Battalion in Novosibirsk. At that time, conscripts with higher education were offered the chance to enroll on a reserve lieutenant training course after nine months. After serving for 18 months they would be discharged with an officer’s rank. This was also the path that Serdyukov chose, a former officer in the Defense Ministry central apparatus says, clarifying that in the event of a war Serdyukov would have been eligible to be drafted to serve as a regimental military commissary chief.
But Serdyukov became a strictly peacetime retailer — after leaving the army he went to work for the No. 3 Lenmebeltorg furniture store in Petersburg. It was within the Lenmebeltorg system that he rose from assistant accountant to become director and joint owner of the Petersburg industrial trading company Mebel-market formed on the basis of Lenmebeltorg.
A possible contributory factor to Serdyukov’s transition to state service was his marriage. In 2000 he married Yuliya Pokhlebenina — the daughter of Viktor Zubkov. Zubkov was a party official during Soviet times, he became Vladimir Putin’s deputy in the Petersburg Mayor’s Office in 1990, and he then moved to the tax service – by 1999 he had risen to become deputy minister for taxes and levies while retaining the post of head of the Tax Service’s Petersburg Office.
Read More →
Facebook
Twitter
Google Buzz
LinkedIn
del.icio.us
Google Bookmarks
Yahoo! Buzz
Tumblr
StumbleUpon
FriendFeed
NewsVine
Digg
Tax scam points to complicity of top Russian officials
Two Moscow tax departments at the centre of a tax rebate scam worth hundreds of millions of dollars continued to disburse huge sums long after similar schemes were uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky, the whistle-blowing lawyer who died in jail after making his allegations.
Revelations that the tax rebate scams continued well after Magnitsky’s death raise questions about the level of official protection the fraudulent rebate operations enjoyed. In total, the fraud looks to have cost the Russian treasury more than $800m from 2006 to 2010.
Magnitsky was jailed on separate tax fraud charges in 2008 soon after he alleged a circle of interior and tax ministry officials had conspired to defraud the Russian government via a $230m rebate involving company seals and charters belonging to his former employer, Hermitage Capital, that were seized in a police raid. His death a year later – he would have turned 40 last Sunday – spurred international outrage, causing the US government to draw up a visa blacklist for officials involved in his detention.
Read More →
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
INSIGHT-In Russia, a graft-buster’s mission impossible
Wounded in Afghanistan and an 18-year veteran of Russia’s elite Alfa counter-terrorist forces, Sergei Vasilenko considers himself a patriot.
Which is why, when his bosses at the Federal Security Service – successor to the Soviet KGB – asked him in 2010 to investigate corruption, he jumped at the chance.
The problem, Vasilenko now says, was that his new chiefs at the Federal Tax Service didn’t want him to do his job properly. Vasilenko’s experience opens a window into what even Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, bidding for a third Kremlin term, calls Russia’s “systemic” corruption. It’s a malaise that Putin’s political opponents say has flourished during the prime minister and former president’s 12 years as Russia’s most powerful leader.
Vasilenko says his probe, into suspected fraud involving tax officials in Moscow, met a wall of silence and he was soon out of a job. The Federal Tax Office said it had investigated Vasilenko’s allegations but declined further comment.
Now the former soldier works with Analysis and Security, a local anti-corruption campaign group run by former tax officials, security professionals and managers of firms that have been on the wrong end of the kind of shakedowns the group seeks to expose.
Read More →
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
