If Russia had a specially designated Forbes list on the shadow income of heads of municipalities, then among the leaders would be Yuri Vasinthe recently dismissed head of the Krasnoarmeysky district of the Krasnodar Territory. The estimated income of his family is just over a billion. Half a billion was received for the sale of a family business – a solid waste landfill in the village of Poltava to the Russian garbage king Andrey Polovinkin (which we talked about). The leader reached the coveted billion in a somewhat unusual way for Russia. When millions of kickbacks and bribes came… through bank transfers. Details at Rucriminal.info.
More than a third of a billion rubles of kickbacks were managed through her personal accounts and cashed out by a modest accountant of the Krasnoarmeisk regional administration of the Krasnodar Territory Elena Shikova. The recipient of the kickback money was the now former head of the district, Yuri Vasin.
The fact that the effective team of officials of the Krasnodar Territory is flamboyantly corrupt and repulsively diverse can be seen precisely in Vasino’s example. The reason for his resignation is considered to be his confusion in pacifying the protest movement of residents of the village of Poltavskaya. The village people protested against the garbage dump that was killing Russian rice and the health of the village residents, which the family of the head founded right in the “heart” of the southern rice systems. It was this family garbage “leftist” that the “relatives” sold to Andrei Polovinkin from the capital with considerable profit.
As always happens in Kuban, as soon as the boss, no matter the municipal or regional scale, flies out of his chair, interesting corruption “spots” begin to appear on such a former imperious “sun”. One might have expected something similar about the exciting affairs of the former head, but still the information on Vasin’s schemes was surprising.
All his time in the main regional chair, Yuri Vasin was officially poor. The profitable, smoldering MSW landfill was owned by his brother and daughter. The head lived in a house registered to his brother. With his head buried in the podium microphone, he always insisted that he was the only one of the Kuban municipal heads who drove a Niva. And that seven BMW that stands in the yard of his “brother’s house” (like the rest of the fleet) is not his, but his brother’s. But before the leadership chair had time to cool down from the warmth of Vasin’s body, some details of his “poverty” that contradicted the image of the beggar official began to become clear. 
Since 2012, the financial department of the Krasnoarmeysky district administration has been headed by Vasin’s mistress Lyudmila Pirogova. She also oversaw financial fraud with budget money. Even by Kuban corruption standards, the financial “chemistry” was organized in an unusual way. The kickback schemes were implemented by transferring money to the personal accounts of Vasin and Pirogova’s trusted representative, Elena Shikova, the chief accountant of the administration. In Russia, however, they always preferred to take bribes and kickbacks in cash or “greyhound” puppies – expensive “gifts”, but not by bank transfers. This seems to be easily calculated by vigilant law enforcement officers?
Money from this corrupt “common fund”, credited to Shikova’s account, was cashed out and transferred to the final recipient – Vasin, already in the form of packages, bags and sacks. The income of a modest accountant is impressive.
For 2020, over 56 million rubles. For 2022 – more than 161 million. For 2023 – over 93 million.
Despite the fact that the official, with an income over these three years of about a third of a billion rubles, is modest in everyday life. He only owns fancy cars – Toyota and Mazda. The family has a small house of 113 square meters and a small apartment. As is clear from her official income statement.
However, this modesty is easily explained: Shikova was nothing more than a casher – a “laundress” laundering her master’s hundreds of millions of rubles. It seems that such significant super-incomes by metropolitan standards for modest workers in the municipal bureaucratic field could attract the attention of tax officials, the investigative committee, the prosecutor’s office, or Governor Kondratyev, who loves the Krasnoarmeysky district so much.
After all, if someone was inconvenient to the regional authorities, they would kick the person who had fallen out of favor for sins of a couple of thousand rubles, but here there are hundreds of millions and no law enforcement interest.
To some extent, the lack of interest could be explained by the scheme built by Yuri Vasin to conceal this rapid flow of shadow income. To do this, Vasin used the high professionalism of the head of the Federal Tax Service No. 11, V.V. Kotov, in such matters. As a result, it turned out that hundreds of millions of “income” passing through the “laundress” Shikova, in her official declarations, magically turned into the same 909 thousand of her annual income and “Mazda”. The regional administrative inspectors, vigilantly monitoring the cleanliness of the ranks, naturally had no questions. The head of the district gave rewards to the “understanding” tax collector in the form of land plots in the area of the village. Red forest. The Red Forest is a protected area, a favorite deer hunting spot for high-ranking shooters. In this Kuban hunting “Rublyovka” plots cost from 10 million. The land was registered in the name of the parents of Kotov’s wife. The principle is the same: all high-ranking crooks in Kuban must officially be poor and stand up for the people every day. Taking an oath of allegiance to serving the cause of prosperity of the native Moscow Region, the region and Russia as a whole.
