Click to see full-size image
The Accounts Chamber of Russia identified violations in the Russian space industry in the amount of approximately 50 billion rubles throughout 2018, TASS reported on May 29th.
The head of department, Alexei Kudrin, made the announcement.
“Let me remind you that a year ago we discovered violations in Roscosmos in the amount of 800 billion rubles. Thank God that we have not made revelations in that amount this year,” he said, speaking of the audits by the Accounts Chamber in 2018.
Alexey Kudrin added that the Accounts Chamber was developing new methods of fighting corruption.
“This is a very delicate task, here the society requires more substantial measures given the scale of corruption and embezzlement. Therefore, we must respond to this challenge, which, as we understand, is real, and we are developing new methods in this area and are now updating our agreements, including law enforcement agencies, ” Kudrin said.
The report of the Accounts Chamber reported that in 2017, the department revealed 151 facts of irregularities in the work of Roskosmos for a total of 785.5 billion rubles.
The first deputy head of the state corporation, Maxim Ovchinnikov, said that the reports of the Accounts Chamber for the years 2014-2016 were focusing on issues with the financial discipline and the managing of the budget process.
The former head of Roskosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, who headed the state corporation in May last year, in the summer of 2018 asked the Accounts Chamber to conduct an audit of the industry and approved a plan to counter corruption for 2018-2020.
Kudrin previously called Roscosmos a record holder for the number of financial irregularities in unseen amounts.
According to the head of the Accounts Chamber, procurement procedures were conducted incorrectly, with most commonly the prices being overstated.
In 2018, the Accounts Chamber revealed 9235 violations committed by government agencies when using the budget system. The total amount of violations amounted to 772.7 billion rubles. Which is still lower than the 785.5 billion discovered for Roscosmos alone in 2017.
The Accounts Chamber reported on plans to conduct a series of inspections in the space industry in 2019.
Roskosmos, Progress Rocket and Space Center, NPO them. S.A. Lavochkina and others will be audited using the federal budget funds allocated in 2016-2018. They will also be audited for the current period of 2019, for funds relegated to scientific, technical and innovative activities within the framework of the state program “The National Space Programme 2013-2020.”
The Accounts Chamber will also analyze the effectiveness of the use of funds allocated under the above-mentioned state program for the same period at the Federal State Unitary Enterprise Central Research Institute of Mechanical Engineering of the Rocket and Space Corporation (RSC) Energia, the Center for the operation of ground-based space infrastructure and other industry enterprises.
RSC Energia and Roscosmos will undergo an audit of the use of funds from the federal budget as part of the execution of government contracts between 2016-2018.
In May, the head of the Russian Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, reported on multi-billion-ruble embezzlements identified in Roskosmos.
He added that the investigation had been going on for approximately 5 years and there appears to be no end in sight.
Related to these investigations and developments, there have been several officials in the field that have fled Russia in the midst of audits and investigations. Some of them even fled ahead of the investigations.
Chingiz Agaronov, co-founder of the JSC R&D Company “Cascade” fled Russia back in 2016. On May 22nd, 2019, the Tverskoy Court in Moscow ruled on his arrest in absentia.
He is charged with giving bribes in large amounts to the leaders of the military acceptance committee controlling the installation work at the facilities of the Russian Strategic Missile Forces (RVSN).
Yury Yaskin, a senior official from the Roskosmos space agency, fled Russia in the midst of audits and inspections of the satellite and ballistic-missile research center that he headed.
The Investigative Committee of Russia charged Deputy Chief of the Federal Agency for State Reserves (Rosrezerv) Aleksandr Kiruhin with fraud.
MORE ON THE TOPIC:
- Co-Founder Of Equipment Producer For Strategic Missile Forces Found Guilty Of Corruption, Left Russia
- Russia: Corruption Scandals and Amazing Court Decisions
- Corruption In Russian State-Linked Industry And Miraculous Management Decisions
- Senior Space Official Fled Russia In Mids Of Audits In His Structural Subdivision
