Defense Ministry covers for maintenance shops?

The Investigatory Committee has initiated a criminal case on the fact of an extortion of a large bride for Defense Ministry officials.

Another corruption scandal has flared up around Defense Ministry’s warehouse premises located in Masiukoushchyna. These premises for many years have been rented by companies providing car maintenance services. One of these companies is Avtoritetservis, which did bodywork for cars. The company was the main tenant of the warehouses rented from the Defense Ministry. It used a part of them and sub-lent another part, Ezhednevnik reports.

The investigation will attempt to find out why the Defense Ministry did not lend all the premises itself, but allowed a private company to make profit by sub-lending, as well as what kind of relations the owner of Avtoritetservis had with military officials.

In November 2012 the businessman offered a director of another maintenance shop, who rented the premises from him, to solve the issue with the contract prolongation. And the price for that was rather high - $14 thousand, which were allegedly supposed to be passed to the suspect’s good acquaintances from the Defense Ministry.

The director of the maintenance shop had nothing else to do but agree to pay otherwise he would have had to move out and dismantle the expensive equipment. In November 2012 he gave the businessman $1.5 thousand for the Defense Ministry officials, and $12.5 more thousand in January.

Based on this fact a criminal case has been initiated against the owner of Avtoritetservis according to the part 5 of the article 16 and part 2 of thearticle 431 of the Criminal Code of Belarus (bribe incitement).

They confirmed the fact of the case’s initiation in Minsk’s Investigatory Committee department, but they abstain from commenting so far and do not explain whether Defense Ministry officials are actually involved into this illegal deal.

The investigation has just started and it is not yet known how it will end.