Thread by @ChrisO_wiki

1/ A senior Russian officer has been arrested and charged with embezzlement and taking bribes for the demilitarisation of old tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. Colonel Ilya Timofeev is accused of taking bribes worth millions of rubles and plundering military funds. ⬇️

2/ The Russian newspaper Kommersant reports on the arrest of Colonel Timofeev, the head of the Recycling Service of the Main Armored Directorate (GABTU) of the Russian Ministry of Defence. He has been placed in a pre-trial detention centre to prevent him fleeing Russia.

3/ The colonel was investigated by the FSB's Military Counterintelligence Department (DVKR) and the military investigation branch of the Investigative Committee, roughly Russia's equivalent of the FBI. He was arrested at the end of August 2023.

4/ Kommersant reports that Timofeev received bribes from businessmen and embezzled budget funds. He is said to have received at least 3 million rubles ($32,000) in bribes and to have stolen another 6 million ($64,000) between April 2021 and February 2022.

5/ Timofeev is accused of having "extorted money from entrepreneurs for performing actions that were within his official powers, as well as for general patronage and connivance in his service" and to have been bribed by a company called NPP SVT LLC.

6/ NPP SVT LLC demilitarises tanks and infantry fighting vehicles for use as monuments across Russia. Another company, Maigeorezervy LLC, was also implicated in the scandal. Its General Director, Igor Fomichev, was also arrested and charged with involvement.

7/ As well as Timofeev, another officer – one of the commanders of the unit in which tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers were stored – was likewise arrested and charged.

8/ The investigation reportedly began at the garrison in Kostroma in western Russia. Unidentified officers serving there were suspected of receiving large-scale bribes, including personnel responsible for storing military equipment at the base.

9/ (Although it's unnamed in the article, the base in question is almost certainly the 22nd Central Tank Reserve Base at Buy, 85 km north-east of Kostroma city. It will have seen a lot of activity during the war, which may explain how Timofeev was found out.)

10/ The trail led back to Moscow and Col Timofeev. According to Kommersant, the defendants operated as an "organised crime group", communicating secretly via military networks and mobile phones registered to other people.

11/ There have been many previous cases of corruption in Russia's logistics system. A notable one involved Colonel Evgeny Pustovoy, then the head of the procurement department for armoured vehicles, who was arrested in January 2022 for embezzling 860 million rubles ($8,912,412).

12/ Earlier, a so-called 'officer gang' operated out of Malino military airfield about 88 km south-east of Moscow. They sold aircraft engines, equipment and air-to-air missiles, earning millions of dollars a year before being arrested.

13/ Such instances of corruption have had very serious consequences for Russia's war effort. Large amounts of stored military equipment were found to be essentially useless, having been stripped of components, wiring and anything else of value. /end

Source:
kommersant.ru/doc/6210585