Roscosmos Top Manager Fled Abroad

He also held a senior position in Putin's office in the Volga Federal District.

Kommersant has learned that Vladimir Meshkov, a former top Roscosmos manager and deputy head of the department of the presidential envoy's office in the Volga Federal District (VFD), has fled abroad and is on an international wanted list. According to the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, he was involved in the embezzlement of more than 600 million rubles from the budget allocated for the reconstruction of the test facilities of the Research and Test Centre of the Rocket and Space Industry (NTC RKP) - the main Roscosmos organisation for fire testing liquid rocket engines.

It didn't take long for the Basmanny court judge, Natalia Dudar, to consider the petition of the Main Investigation Directorate of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation to arrest 41-year-old Vladimir Meshkov in absentia. The arguments of the investigation were standard, as were those of the defence. According to the court's decision, the defendant, who is wanted for fraud on a particularly large scale (Part 4 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code), will be detained for two months. This period begins from the moment of Vladimir Meshkov's extradition to the Russian Federation from abroad or his detention on the territory of Russia.

The criminal case on fraud of a particularly large scale, in which he is a defendant, was opened on 11 January 2019. The investigation was based on the materials of the Prosecutor General's Office inspection, which revealed fraud in the execution of the contract between NRC RKP and the contractor, OOO Moskapstroy. According to the supervisory version, about 1 billion rubles were stolen out of the 3.2 billion rubles allocated for the state defence contract for the reconstruction and technical re-equipment of the NRC RKP plants.

In the course of the investigation, the Investigative Committee of the State Investigative Committee found that of the 1.5 billion rubles received by Moskapstroy almost immediately after winning the tender, more than 1 billion rubles appeared in the accounts of companies that "showed signs of fictitiousness".

From there, according to the investigation, it went to the contractors. Moskapstroy, which was declared bankrupt in February 2020, performed only 3% of the work and spent only 53 million rubles on it, the investigators found.

Almost all the defendants in this investigation were detained from 14 to 16 July 2021. Then, at the request of the investigators, the Basmanny court remanded in custody Vasily Tuboltsev, the former co-founder and former chief accountant of OOO Moskapstroy, as well as several managers of companies that, according to the Investigative Committee, were involved in the withdrawal of money. All of them were charged in May 2022 with money laundering (Part 4 of Article 174.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), in addition to the initial charge of fraud. Maxim Shcherbakov, the general director and second co-founder of Moskapstroy, who had absconded from the investigation and had signed 20 contracts worth more than 1 billion rubles, was arrested in absentia in November 2021.

The role of the then top management of Roskosmos in this story was not determined by the investigation for a long time.

Only in April 2022 Maxim Mamsurov, former deputy director of the construction department of Roskosmos, joined the businessmen in pre-trial detention. According to some reports, he allegedly approved the transfer of budget funds to the accounts of Moskapstroy.

According to Kommersant, Mamsurov and the other defendants are now completing their familiarisation with the case file. The investigation has adjusted the damage caused by them to 600 million rubles.

At that, the investigation had grounds to bring to criminal responsibility Vladimir Meshkov, as well as the executive director of Roscosmos for capital construction Alexei Borodin in the spring of 2019. In any case, the materials sent to the ICR by the Prosecutor General's Office at the time stated that their actions showed at least signs of abuse of power (Part 3 of Article 286 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). The Investigative Committee considered that Borodin and Meshkov facilitated the implementation of the criminal scheme. In particular, with their help, Moskapstroy was allegedly the only participant in a closed tender. At the same time, the LLC was allowed to participate in the tender in violation of the Law "On the System of Contracts...", as the organisation not only did not have the construction capacity to fulfil the state order, but, according to the inspection, had attached a false bank guarantee to the tender application. In November 2018, Alexei Borodin and Vladimir Meshkov resigned from Roscosmos, and in March 2019 they took up the positions of head and deputy head of the department of the presidential envoy's office in the Volga Federal District, respectively. Meshkov, according to Kommersant, also resigned from there in 2021, and then disappeared altogether when the ICR showed interest in him. It should be noted that Borodin left office even earlier. However, it is not known whether the law enforcement agencies have any claims against him. But unlike Meshkov's colleague, Alexei Borodin's details are not on the Russian Interior Ministry's wanted database.