A court has found the evidence gathered by the Altai Territory investigating bodies of the Russia’s Investigative Committee sufficient to convict eight members of an organized criminal group: 51-year-old Olga Voskanyan, 32-year-old Armen Voskanyan, 48-year-old Olga Ageyeva, 53-year-old Vitaly Kiselyov, 67-year-old Mikhail Novikov, 41-year-old Alexey Proskurin, 45-year-old Dmitry Chernenko, 52-year-old Natalya Chistova. Depending on the role of each of them in the crime, they were found guilty of crimes under part 4 of article 159 of the RF Penal Code (fraud on a very large scale committed by an organized criminal group – 17 counts), part 2 of article 159 (fraud entailing considerable damage to a citizen), part 3 of article 159 (fraud committed on a large scale), part 1 of article 30, part 4 of article 159 (plotting a fraud – 5 counts), part 3 of article 30, part 4 of article 159 (attempted fraud committed on a large scale by an organized group), part 1 of article 327 (forgery of a document granting a right with the purpose to use it – 6 counts).
According to investigators, in May 2007, resident of Barnaul Olga Voskanyan, who had extensive experience of working as a real estate broker, set up and led an organized criminal group to get constant illegal income by committing serious crimes against property. The woman involved in the group her son Armen Voskanyan and four acquaintances of hers and later three more people committed several crimes together with them. Depending on their roles, members of the group found in blocks of flats in Barnaul empty spaces in municipal and private ownership or illegally taken by other people, and abandoned spaces in joint ownership of the municipality and the private owners. The swindlers got ownership to those flats by forging official documents and filing them with the administrations of districts in Barnaul and with federal bodies registering ownership of real estate and deals with it.
Over the period the group was active, between May 2007 and September 2011, its members stole 23 flats, plotted 5 more and attempted one stealing of real estate property. The loss the municipality suffered stands at over 15 million rubles.
The investigation took over a year and a half with the number of files in the case 88 volumes and 6 thousand pages of the indictment. There were many counts and a lot of people involved, so the investigators had to make a lot of careful work to gather and consolidate the evidence: they ran around 60 complicated handwriting, evaluating and technical expert examinations, questioned over 200 witnesses. In addition, during the probe the arrested the property of the accused and reimbursed 3 million 812 thousand rubles to the state.
The court has sentenced Olga Voskanyan to 7 years in prison, Armen Voskanyan – 6 years, Chistovaya – 6 years and 4 months, Novikov – 5.8 years to be served in a minimum-security penal colony; Ageyeva has got 6.5 years, Kiselyov – 5 years, Proskurin – 3 years and Chernenko 3 years of a suspended sentence.
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