Investigation Committee of the Russian Interior Ministry will check the bank's "Stroycredit" former management for involvement in the embezzlement in the company "Transneft" during the construction of oil pipeline "Eastern Siberia-Far East, press officer at the Interior Ministry IC, Irina Dudukina told Interfax.

"The criminal case of theft of funds from the company" Transneft "was initiated in August 2009 and in December the same year, it was accepted for proceedings under the UK Ministry of Internal Affairs", said Dudukina.

"Currently, the former owners and managers of commercial banks Stroycredit are checked, as it was involved in the financing of the project”, the representative of the Investigative Committee said.

Let us recall, assistant governor of Kirov Region, Alex Navalny, who owns several privileged stocks of the company "Transneft", has announced in a recent post titled "How they saw in Transneft” that for the construction of the pipeline of Transneft - “East Siberia - Pacific Ocean” (ESPO) - 1100 rubles had been stolen from pockets of every adult Russian, i.e. $ 4 billion of state funds.

To prove it he cited the fragments of documents he possessed - a report provided by Transneft to Chamber, which was never made public. Navalny published these documents on his website, and duplicated on file sharing services.

This post caused a storm in the blogosphere, but the state remained calm, and the head of the Accounting Chamber Sergei Stepashin said that the data did not correspond to reality. According to him, last check of "Transneft" was two years ago, but no theft was revealed then, on the other hand, it helped to optimize resources and project implementation, and finally "the project was implemented well."

However, already on December 22, after several searches made in Moscow under a criminal case on theft during the construction of ESPO, a law enforcement source told Interfax that the criminal case of theft of funds belonging to Transneft, "was instituted in 2008 year, long before the publication by a scandalous blogger Alexis Navalny.

"The searches are conducted in a commercial bank, as well as in private houses of a number of suspects in the criminal case," the official noted. The case, that involved seizure of documents in "Stroycredit”, concerned four billion rubles only. Navalny claimed that the volume of the theft in "Transneft" during the construction of oil pipeline "Eastern Siberia - Pacific Ocean” accounted several billion dollars.

Law enforcement agencies seized documents in the bank "Stroycredit" under the case of a three-year statute of limitation in respect of contractors and subcontractors of Transneft, the chairman of board of the bank, Jury Prygaev said in his turn,.

The official representative of "Transneft" Igor Demin, in turn, told us that this is about the criminal case brought up on the initiative of the company in connection with the failure of the contractor works on construction of ESPO to more than $ 4 billion. He clarified that the application was filed three years ago.

Source: www.newsru.com on December 22, 2010