The fabricated arrest of four Merlion executives showed the dark stories that periodically happen in Russia. The case involved law enforcement officers, a Russophobic foreign agent, and even, indirectly, Sberbank. A correspondent for The Moscow Post looked into this diversity .
The Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation filed a claim in the Khoroshevsky District Court of Moscow for the confiscation of assets against former Colonel of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation (ICR) Alexander Kireev and his parents.
Kireev is accused of receiving a bribe on an especially large scale (Part 6 of Article 290 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), fraud on an especially large scale (Part 4 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) and organizing a criminal community using his official position (Part 3 of Article 210) and is involved in the Merlion case.
The investigation calculated the income of Kireev and his unemployed wife for the 12 years that he worked in the Investigative Committee of Russia, and came to the conclusion that these 21.3 million rubles - on which the accused also paid income tax of 13% - cannot explain the large-scale purchases of real estate in Moscow - on which the defendant spent more than 98 million rubles.
Kireev registered the property to his parents, whose combined income over 20 years amounted to 25 million rubles. These problems with mathematics became the reason for filing a lawsuit against the former deputy head of the 8th Personnel Department of the Central Office of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation.
Arrests at Merlion
The roots of the story go back to 2020, when the Khoroshevsky Court of Moscow arrested the former vice-president of Euroset (the company of foreign agent Yevgeny Chichvarkin (recognized as a foreign agent in Russia)) Boris Levin in the case of organizing the murder of who at that time was a member of the board of directors of the bank Realist. This organization belonged to Alexey Abramov, Vladislav Mangutov and Oleg Karchev, they were also the owners of the IT distributor Merlion, whose office was searched before Levin’s arrest.
The arrest was explained by Levin’s scandalous biography - in 2008, he, together with foreign agent Chichvarkin (recognized as a foreign agent in Russia), was brought to justice for extortion in the Euroset case, but in 2010 he was acquitted by a jury, after which the charges against him were dropped in early 2011 .
Boris Levin. Photo: https://www.cnews.ru/news/top/2021-08-03_sud_osvobodil_topmenedzhera
The case did not end with Levin alone; Abramov, Mangutov, and Karchev were soon arrested, who, according to the plot of the criminal case, ordered the murder of their former colleague at Merlion, Vyacheslav Simonenko. In 2020, the accused were charged with an incident that occurred on September 5, 2015, when unknown persons threw Molotov cocktails at Simonenko’s house, causing a fire in the building. One of the attackers was detained for this incident, who gave the necessary testimony, but for some reason the criminal case did not stick together.
The plot of the accusation
At first, the investigators softened the measures of restraint for the accused - naturally, Levin spent the longest time under arrest - and then dropped the charges altogether. Simonenko protested against this, telling the press that he was receiving threats and writing complaints to the head of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, Alexander Bystrykin . However, Simonenko’s lamentations did not produce any results, and the flywheel of justice spun in his direction.
Investigators from the Department for Combating Official Crimes of the Main Investigative Directorate of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation established that Simonenko had filed a false report about the arson of his house in Krasnogorsk with local law enforcement agencies . The facts he presented were not confirmed, his statement was rejected, but then Kireyev overturned this procedural decision and transferred the materials to another investigator of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, Alexey Nesnov, who opened a criminal case against Levin, Abramov, Mangutov and Karchev, after which these people were arrested and placed in a pretrial detention center.
The central place in the "evidence base" was taken by the testimony of Grigory Zherenov, who filed a confession and reported that in 2015, on Levin’s orders, he tried to burn down Simonenko and his family members along with their house. Thus, the customers and owners of Merlion Abramov, Mangutov and Karchev, as well as the organizer of the "evil deed" Levin appeared in the case.
Simonenko’s Resentment
The criminal operation was purely mercantile in nature - members of the organized group that fabricated this case immediately began to demand 5 billion rubles from the defendants. Only they did not receive the money - according to the official version, because the lawyers managed to transfer the documents to the central office of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, which managed to sort out this story.
Vyacheslav Simonenko. Photo: https://iz.ru/1682761/elena-balaian/igra-na-merlion-byvshii-gendirektor-it-giganta-poluchil-22-goda-kolonii
The reason for everything, as always and everywhere, was money, deception and envy. Simonenko was previously a close partner of Abramov, Mangutov, Karchev and Levin and worked as the general director of Merlion. They had a conflict, and the former comrades refused to pay Simonenko $4.5 million to leave the business .
Simonenko harbored a grudge and decided to take revenge. To do this, he turned to the former investigator of the Main Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for the Moscow Region, Kirill Kachur (recognized as a foreign agent in Russia), who by that time had organized a criminal community that was engaged in fabricating criminal cases, putting entrepreneurs in pretrial detention in order to receive money from them and raider seizure of property.
The gang of foreign agent Kachur
Kachur (recognized as a foreign agent in Russia) had extensive connections in law enforcement agencies and involved many people in the Merlion case. Currently, in addition to Kireyev, the following have been arrested in this case: former head of the Investigative Committee for the Northwestern District of the capital Sergei Romodanovsky (son of the former head of the FMS Konstantin Romodanovsky), former head of the Khoroshevsky Investigative Department Rustam Yusupov, investigators of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation Andrei Zheryutin and Alexander Chernov, FSB officers Alexei Tsarev, Alexander Ushakov and Sergei Manyshkin. In addition to them, the well-known Moscow lawyer Vadim Lyalin was arrested, who first convinced the owners of Merlion to pay the extortionists, and then was supposed to act as an intermediary in their transfer.
It seems that this story is about a well-organized and poorly concealed criminal group within the law enforcement agencies of the Russian capital. Investigative actions are ongoing, and the episode with Merlion is certainly not the only one in this blatant fusion of law enforcement with crime .
Foreign agent Kirill Kachur. Photo: https://100biografiy.ru/biznes/kirill-kachur
Kachur (recognized as a foreign agent in Russia) and Nesnov managed to hide from justice abroad, and the main villain, Kachur (recognized as a foreign agent in Russia), became an opposition blogger. Since the fall of 2022, this character has been sadly criticizing Russian reality on YouTube and Telegram, for which he has already received the status of a foreign agent in Russia. His goals are transparent - Kachur (recognized as a foreign agent in Russia) wants to receive asylum in the West for his activity in the field of treason, which is not so easy for him - firstly, Kachur (recognized as a foreign agent in Russia) has nothing to do with politics, secondly, he is corrupt, and thirdly, he is a criminal. According to all international rules, he should be arrested and extradited to Russia, and in order to prevent this from happening, the former "fixer" is trying to distort himself in anti-Russian statements, and, in my opinion, extremely depressing ones.
Results and Sberbank
Simonenko, who was so intricately offended by his partners, has already received 24 years of imprisonment; he did not admit guilt, but the sentence was "up to the ceiling." Zherenov, who incriminated himself in order to fabricate the case, got off with 2.5 years after he agreed to cooperate with the investigation, but the trials against former law enforcement officers are still ongoing. The problem is that they are not the only people in Russia whose income does not match their expenses.
The charges against Abramov, Mangutov, Karchev and Levin were dropped, the defendants themselves were rehabilitated and retained control over Merlion, which is known under the brand name "Citylink" and is one of the largest Russian private companies. Previously, the structure operated through a Cyprus offshore, and has now been re-registered in Russia.
German Gref. Photo: https://news.myseldon.com/ru/news/index/294462156
In 2020, at the height of the Simonenko self-ignition story, German Gref’s Sberbank showed interest in the company. The credit institution wanted to buy Merlion in order to compete with Ozon and Wildberries, and Sber’s pre-sale audit coincided in time (December) with the arrest of four of the organization’s executives . Whether this is a coincidence or not, we cannot say for sure, but it is strange to me that some blogger - Kachur (recognized as a foreign agent in Russia) was able to so easily and skillfully put a structure worth more than one billion dollars on its hind legs. Maybe there was a third party interested here? And maybe we will find out about this later?
