The Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin issued an order dismissing the head of the Russian Space Systems (RKS) Yury Urlichich from the position of the General designer.Together with the position of the General Designer of RKS, Urlichich was dismissed from the post of General Designer of GLONASS. However, he remains at his post of the General Director of the company.

Let's remind, that in July, the former Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov wrote a letter to the Premiere, in which he proposed to divide the powers of the general designer of the GLONASS system, so that one person was responsible for military-technical implementation of the system, and the other - for the introduction of services on the basis of GLONASS in the national economy. He was supported by the head of the Federal Space Agency Vladimir Popovkin.

Let's remind that the dismissal of Urlichich occurred shortly after police had announced the detection of the thefts in the amount of 6.5 billion rubles, when developing GLONASS satellite navigation system in the RKS. 

The head of the Presidential Administration Sergei Ivanov commented the situation. He told that he received the first information about the thefts in 2010. According to him, the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Rashid Nurgaliyev addressed to him and reported that he “has not only a feeling, but the first facts”, speaking about the embezzlement of budgetary funds on GLONASS. Ivanov had a meeting with the law enforcement officers who were working directly on the case; they brought him the papers and schemes of the “leaving” of the money.
Until now, Ivanov said nothing. “I gave no sign, because I knew that if I gave a sign it would result to suspicion and try to cover their tracks”, the Kremlin official said, comparing the persons involving in the case of the thefts of funds to traitors.

According to media reports, the investigators have intensified their work since September 2011. It was after the Roscosmos transferred the results of the own scrutiny of the RKS to the 4th Directorate of Internal Affairs which had detected no-purpose use of 565 million rubles allocated for the GLONASS program.