Dems will torpedo it.
PART 2: Russia’s Deputy Defence Minister Timur Ivanov was in charge of financing construction projects for the MoD. Osechkin learned that Ivanov & Shoigu’s corruption may have influenced the timing of the invasion of Ukraine. But first, how the embezzlement scheme worked -
Unfinished Production (НЗП) is a budgetary category of construction projects in the MoD that were not completed for whatever reason. The incomplete construction projects are handed off from the original contractor to someone else, so the total cost to complete is higher.
Example: If a new construction (0% complete) is budgeted for $5M, the completion of Unfinished Production construction is more expensive, and the allocated budget is 1.5 to 2 times higher. A 20% complete construction above could have a budget of $8M, making the total $9M (1+8).
Ivanov’s scheme, in which of course Defence Minister Shoigu himself was also involved:
Initially contract an MoD construction to a naïve but capable company, selling them hopes of lucrative future contracts for successful completion. Ivanov would give an advance payment of 20%.
The construction contractor is excited to have the Ministry of Defence as the client, and aggressively works to get the construction completed properly.
But at 90% completion, Ivanov at MoD would pull the rug from under the contractor and only ‘accept’ the work completed on the advance that was paid, which was just 20%.
The mark (contractor) is then discarded, or if he doesn’t ‘get it,’ and tries to fight the injustice, he is either killed or thrown in jail on fabricated charges, where the prosecutors / investigators are conveniently part of the Ivanov/Shoigu mafia.
So now, Ivanov has a nearly complete construction (90%), but according to accounting, it is only 20% complete. Ivanov then contracts his own construction partners, one of whom has now been arrested - Alexander Fomin of OlympCityStroy.
In just 2023, Alexander Fomin’s company OlympCityStroy had a revenue of over ₽65 billion ($706 million), most of which came from Defence Ministry contracts handed out by Ivanov. Fomin has been flipped and is now cooperating with the investigation to bury Ivanov.
Example - a 90% complete $5M project fraudulently listed as just 20% complete on the MoD books is handed off to Fomin by Ivanov, with double the budget for the remaining 80% that needs completion - $8M. Fomin completes the remaining 10% and they steal the rest - $7M.
The current investigation against Ivanov is likely to lead to mass arrests and charges & won’t be about just for corruption but for racketeering by an organized criminal organization. Over 1,000 contracts were part of this Incomplete Projects scheme with countless victims.
Now this gets crazy: Timur Ivanov was interrogated as part of an investigation into this scheme in the summer of 2021 when several of the ‘marks’ (contractors who got scammed) were thrown in jail by Ivanov but became cooperating victims/witnesses for investigators against Ivanov.
This 2021 investigation became a huge problem for not just Ivanov but also Defence Minister Shoigu himself, who has been profiting off of this racketeering scheme, as well as for Tsalikov, another Deputy Defence Minister. They desperately needed to stop this investigation.
According to Osechkin’s sources, in 2021 Shoigu made Military Intelligence under the command of the General Staff fabricate countless reports for Putin which painted an apocalyptic picture: in the coming months NATO ground forces would enter Ukraine to de-occupy Donbas.
The false reports to Putin about NATO to instigate a crisis and a war to halt the investigation into their corruption worked, facilitating the start of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Shoigu and his mafia urgently needed this war.
Shoigu knows Putin well, and he was convinced Putin would not change horses midstream if they started a war against Ukraine. Not only did Shoigu manage to get rid of the 2021 corruption investigation against them by manipulating Putin, his MoD budget skyrocketed with the war.
UPDATE: Russian Deputy Defence Minister Ruslan Tsalikov has now been interrogated concerning the embezzlement scheme that allowed them to steal tens of billions of dollars from the MoD budget over the years.
Deputy Defence Minister Goremykin is probably next, given his close personal ties with Timur Ivanov.
The question is - can Putin afford to purge the entire top echelon of the Defence Ministry?
https://twitter.com/igorsushko/status/1783857222029803546