The other day Navalny published on his blog the papers on the ESPO project, prepared in 2008 by specialists of Transneft, on request of the Accounting Chamber. "They have stolen 10 billion rubles on the design and survey works only," Navalny wrote, referring to the company materials.

According to Navalny, the total amount of waste during the construction of ESPO is at least $ 4 billion. The calculations were based on published papers, peer reviews and media publications, he told Vedomosti.

Yesterday the representative of the Chamber could not confirm the authenticity of documents published by Navalny: "In the near future we will check these documents and those that we have at our disposal." Documents have been requested from the archives under a specially commissioned order of the leadership - it was given yesterday, immediately after the publication of statements by Navalny, the representative of the Chamber added.

"This story raises a lot more questions. For example, it is not clear on what basis the pipeline and oil terminal in Skovorodino were excluded from the objects of the first stage of the project," Navalny outraged. In his appeal to Attorney General, he pointed out that the contract with OAO Energoterminal (port owner in Skovorodino) was signed by Transneft, in violation of orders of the government.

At first it was planned that the oil terminal in Skovorodino (capacity of 15 million tons) will be part of ESPO, a former senior executive of Transneft told Vedomosti. But in the final document prepared by the Ministry of Energy, there is no mention of this facility. It turned out that by the time the structures of the ESN Group by Gregory Berezkin bought the land under the terminal in Skovorodino. And he convinced the management of Transneft to join the project. This is confirmed by another former employee of the monopoly. The monopoly had no choice, the interlocutor of Vedomosti said: "The aim was to implement the ESPO as soon as possible, and Transneft could not do it without the consent of the owners of the land. So we had to accede to the proposal of Berezkin.

Berezkin managed to find a common language with the new head of "Transneft", Nikolay Tokarev, who led the monopoly of the fall of 2007 and in August 2008, it became known that the control over "Energoterminale" moved to "Transneft", while Zalana by Berezkin had 49, 96% remaining. ESN structures built Skovorodino, and after a change in leadership of "Transneft" gave it control of the terminal operator, the representative of ESN explained earlier.

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Golden Pipe

Since the beginning of its construction the pipe has risen in price more than once: the project started with a budget of 164.04 billion rubles, as the report of the Chamber says. ESPO went up to 303 billion rubles because of the movement of transport route away from Lake Baikal. In January 2009, the president of "Transneft" Nikolay Tokarev estimated the project at 450 billion rubles.