Detained Kuban Transport Minister Released, Testifies Against Colleagues
A source from 93.RU reported a change in the preventive measure for Alexei Pereverzev, the transport minister of Krasnodar Krai. He will now be under a written pledge not to leave the area. The reason: he made a deal with the investigation and gave detailed testimony against regional officials.
Pereverzev himself was detained and sent to a pre-trial detention center on January 22 along with two deputies — Alexander Dashuk and Alexei Smaglyuk.
Earlier, portal 93.RU wrote that the transport minister is implicated in a scheme to «seize road construction projects». According to the prosecutor«s office, it was organized by former State Duma deputy (now detained) Anatoly Voronovsky.
Context. Alexei Pereverzev became first deputy transport minister in early 2016. In late September 2017, he headed the department. Essentially, Pereverzev was the successor to Voronovsky, who held this post until September 2017.
According to the supervisory agency, in 2016, Voronovsky together with Andrei Doroshenko (a current State Duma deputy), Alexander Kravchenko (a current deputy of the Legislative Assembly of Krasnodar Krai (ZSK)), and other controlled individuals distributed state contracts for road works in the region among «their own firms» and received kickbacks in the form of percentages from the estimates. Companies that refused to play by such rules were simply squeezed out of the market.
Money obtained in this way was laundered into the shadow economy, used to capitalize the participants« own companies or to form new organizations. More details about this scheme were written here.
