News

Units of the Investigative Committee of Russia take measures to protect rights of orphan children during investigations into illegal activities during housing provision

The Ingushetia Republican Directorate of the Investigative Committee of Russia has launched a probe into the 36-year-old Deputy Director of Mria LLC. He is suspected of committing an offense under Part 4 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code of Russia (swindling on a large scale).

According to the investigators, Mria LLC was obliged by contracts concluded in 2016-2017 to purchase and supply to the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Ingushetia well-appointed apartments to be used for providing orphan children and children left without parental care with housing options. However, the man had failed to buy and supply the required apartments; instead, he had stolen over 8 million rubles of budgetary money received for this purpose and applied at his sole discretion.

At the moment, the investigative activities associated with the probe and aimed to gather and prove the evidence are ongoing. The criminal investigation is ongoing.

Apart from that, the Stavropol Regional Directorate of the Investigative Committee Russia has finished the investigation into a 62-year-old man. He is charged with committing offenses under Part 4 of Article 159 (swindling) and Part 1 of Article 238 (fulfillment of works or rendering of services which do not meet safety requirements) of the Criminal Code of Russia.

According to the investigation, in 2013, the accused individuals had found out that auctions had been taking place in Stavropol Territory for state contracts on the participatory construction of apartment buildings in order to provide housing to orphan children and children left without parental care and to cover the public needs of the Territory. To take part in the auctions, he had registered an organization bearing no intention to carry out business activities. Following that, in order to take part in the auction, the accused individual had presented project documentation for other objects of construction, which provided a basis to conclude six public contracts for apartment houses in Stanitsa Lysogorskaya for providing orphan children with housing options of the total value of over 13 million rubles. Thereafter, he had built houses unfit for occupation due to numerous significant drawbacks. Despite that, the man had used forged documents to hand the houses over to the balance of the regional executive authorities, and apartments in these buildings had been provided to 16 orphaned children and children left without parental care. In this, the numerous construction defects and incompatibility of the apartments with technical and sanitary requirements had been detected during the maintenance of the premises, that is: soggy pockets at the bottom of bearing walls, destruction of the plaster layer from pitch level of the first floor, deformation of the floor coverings, systematic flooding of structural elements of the apartment buildings with groundwater, and other defects.

The investigation gathered enough evidence; therefore, the criminal case with the approved indictment was sent to the court to be tried on the merits.

Immediately after the probe was launched, investigators motioned the Minister of Proprietary Relations of Stavropol Territory to immediately restore the rights and legal interests of orphaned children by providing them with a well-appointed housing that would meet all technical and sanitary requirements. Thus, the relevant authorities took measures to restore the rights of the orphans, who were relocated from substandard housing to well-appointed apartments.

It should be noted that, upon the instruction of Chairman Alexander Bastrykin, the Investigative Committee has been closely monitoring the provision of housing to orphan children for several years, acting as an executor of the Russian President’s order to urgently develop a complex of measures to eliminate the waiting part of orphans’ receiving housing. Over 260,000 individuals of this category of citizens have been waiting for a home at the beginning of 2019. Since the problem of non-provision of housing and provision of housing unfit for living to orphan children is still very acute, each of the cases is supervised by the Investigative Committee, which immediately launches a criminal investigation to establish all the circumstances in an impartial manner.