The governor of the Khantys-Mansis district, in Siberia, was surprised entrusting a mayor with the corruption scheme which had short concerning the constructions of public buildings. The meeting in which the two women participated was broadcast live on the internet.
by Benoît Vitkine (Moscow, correspondent)
Who said Russia was not a transparent country? This is evidenced by the meeting organized on January 5 between the governor of the district of Khantys-Mansis, Natalia Komarova, and a handful of elected officials and civil servants of this vast Siberia region rich in oil. The subjects are technical, Russia hibernates again after the New Year’s celebrations, but the meeting is entirely broadcast on the Internet, live. It is not surprising, therefore, what it only took a few days to the animators of a local Telegram channel to identify an amazing passage.
To the mayor of the city of Kogalym, 60,000 inhabitants, who complains of slowness in public constructions, governor Komarova makes this confession: “But you know that if we are looking for those responsible, it is on We are falling, the principal: municipalities or regional authorities. Because we have this interesting little game: we design all the documentation for construction so that, two months later, it is necessary Stop the work and redo all the documentation. Everyone is a winner! “
Clearly, M Komarova unveils a corruption scheme by which civil servants and managers of construction companies (very often the same people) share public money. Feeling that she was a bit far away, the senior official turns to the technicians: “Did you put off the microphones?” In stride, the passage is cut off from the online version.
In vain: the video had already been recovered And readers of the region have themselves been able to make the link with the numerous public constructions in suffering – 350, according to the count of the local site Khanti I Mansis, with the future hospital of Nijnevartovsk, under construction for twenty years for a additional cost of 30 billion rubles (400 million euros).
“Information attack”
When the case broke out, on January 11, the region defended itself as it could. The words of the governor would have been only one way to denounce, “with irony”, the said corruption diagrams. More significantly, the official discourse insists that the – very relative – noise aroused by the declarations of M me komarova constitutes “an informational attack carried out with technologies similar to those used against the forces armies “. In other words, evoking corruption in the distant region of Khantys-Mansis is nothing other than a way of attacking the security of Russia. It is with the same justification that the last Russian investigation sites were chased and closed, from spring 2022.
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