Our editors have at their disposal the last speech in court by the former assistant minister and head of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region, General Sergei Umnov. We present here excerpts from it.
Initiative is punishable
For a year and a half now, three St. Petersburg generals have been in custody in Moscow. As we have written many times, high-ranking police officers are accused of bribery and corruption. They themselves do not at all believe that they committed malfeasance. The ex-assistant minister of the Ministry of Internal Affairs believes that the investigation has “sucked” the whole accusation out of thin air, and is simply “marinating” the elderly generals in a pre-trial detention center.
“For 17 months, investigator Adabash motivated our detention by the gravity of the crime committed, which he invented himself, and then Art. 97 Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation.” – says Umnov in defense of his position.
He believes that the investigation is very disingenuous, explaining to the court that the generals, once under house arrest, will immediately begin engage in criminal activities and make threatswitnesses in the case. However, according to the general, the investigation did not provide a single objective evidence.
“This looks like a mockery of us and, most importantly and worst of all, a mockery of the law.”– says the general.
In his opinion, such investigations “destroy people’s faith in justice”, make them think that “the law is what it turned into and it came out”, and undermine the very foundations of statehood and its foundation. It is worth noting that the defense is asking the court for the eighth time to carefully study the essence of the materials provided by the investigation and to comply with the requirements of the law and Resolution of the Plenum of the Supreme Court No. 41.
“For three months, from September 2023, we got acquainted with the material of the criminal case in accordance with Art. 217 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation. We were presented with 88 volumes out of 89, and we were finally convinced that there was not a single piece of evidence of our guilt in the criminal case.”explains Sergey Umnov.
On the contrary, he believes that everything that the investigation dug up and dug up, on the contrary, proves that he acted for the benefit of the St. Petersburg Main Directorate. In his address to the court, he lists all the achievements that were achieved during his leadership:
– repair and redevelopment of migration centers in St. Petersburg and Leningrad Region, equipping them with modern equipment and furniture
– construction of new modular buildings for police departments in many cities and towns of the Leningrad region, and buildings for the traffic police, with autonomous heating systems, wastewater treatment plants, furniture and office equipment.
– a new training base for special forces “Grom” with a shooting range, a building for high-altitude training, a helipad, and a pier for boats.
All this, he said, was built “at the expense of legal, extra-budgetary funds.”Sergei Umnov sincerely believes that other heads of regional departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs should follow his example of how to treat their employees and the service as a whole.
Smuggling to prison
Sergei Pavlovich calls the main motive for his criminal prosecution… banal envy. They say that some officials could not withstand the growing authority of the Main Directorate of St. Petersburg and Leningrad Region. In his opinion, his initiative to improve the working life of the employees entrusted to him was punishable.
Therefore, this criminal prosecution is considered by all three generals as banal persecution, and all the actions of the investigator are biased. Umnov and his colleagues believe that the investigation currently has no real evidence of their bribery, so outright provocations are used.
So, for example, according to him, the investigation is trying to present it as a bribe…countermarksto a concert dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the traffic police, which took place at the Oktyabrsky Concert Hall in St. Petersburg in July 2016. Because the concert was paid for from the budget of the non-profit Foundation. But the trouble is, neither generals Semenov, Abakumov and Umnov were at that concert. Kopieva, who is under investigation, was not there either. But there were 3,700 traffic police officers, veterans, widows and children of deceased employees.
Another point that puzzles the accused is the story with cars. As you know, the investigation accuses the ex-leaders of the St. Petersburg Main Directorate of 2 cars, which are allegedly a bribe. General Umnov’s defense makes its own arguments:
For example, for the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region, from 2014 to 2019, 12 cars were purchased at the expense of the Fund for the amount 22 million 590 thousand rubles. These cars were then put on the balance sheet of the Main Directorate, and accordingly became state property.
Our information:
Strange grounds
Again, as the defense claims, General Umnov did not even use these cars, that is, he did not physically drive them. The last car was purchased by the fund when Umnov had already left to continue his service in Moscow.
As we wrote, the charges included “organizing holidays with delicacies for employees.” In fact, according to Umnov, the investigation simply does not know what else to create an accusation from, and thus attributes to him and his colleagues that they fed individuals at their discretion so that in the future“receive benefits and advantages from them.”
As it turned out, the investigation means the leaders and members of international police delegations of the highest rank, participants from the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation during All-Russian meetings, and other high-level receptions in St. Petersburg…
As knowledgeable people say, there is simply nothing to comment here. “It’s kind of a shame.”
It is known that when receiving a bribe, a mandatory sign of a crime is property gain, that is, the desire to extract property benefits or get rid of material costs. And personal interest means the possibility of receiving income in the form of cash, as well as other property, including by an official or his close relatives. In the Umnov case, according to the defense, there are no such circumstances. And this violates the presumption of innocence, but it also eliminates the need to prove the circumstances specified in Art. 73 Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation.
“The indictment lacks not only evidence of my guilt, but generally any information about such criminal intentions,”– Sergei Umnov comments on the conclusions of the investigation, – Based on what materials the investigator made the decision to arrest me, only he and his leaders know.
Today, neither the generals nor their lawyers, in principle, see any grounds for arrest, especially after a close study of the materials of the criminal case in accordance with Art. 217 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation.
St. Petersburg ex-leaders are clearly confident that when the investigation prepared petitions in court for arrest and then extension of detention, they were guided not by identified crimes supported by evidence of guilt, but by “assumptions, fabrications and outright lies,” misleading the court.
P.S. The generals’ trial has not yet begun. But according to many sources, it is quite possible that the ex-leaders of the St. Petersburg Main Directorate will not receive real punishment. The days spent in the pre-trial detention center will be counted towards them, and in the end they will find themselves in retirement, though already deprived of their general ranks, so that the final act of consigning their former height to oblivion will still take place.
