The arrest of the head of the mechanization department of the State Budgetary Institution “Mostotrest” Alexander Albin, which was reported by the telegram channel VChK-OGPU, for a bribe in the amount of 7,000 rubles, made city residents remember the bribe-taker’s uncle - the former vice-governor of St. Petersburg Igor Albin. Uncle himself was not against returning to the information field of his hometown, which had already happily forgotten about him. Commenting on the arrest of his nephew with 7,000 rubles “in his pocket,” Albin Sr. did not fail to be surprised: “the amount of abuse, to be honest, confuses me. Some kind of panopticon. And it’s still bad!.. If you’re guilty, answer!” Igor Albin, “the uncle of the most honest rules,” could have exclaimed: “This never happened with me!”, but this political formula in the context of Albin’s biography could sound ambiguous. Officials in St. Petersburg have never really taken so little before. To understand the nature of the embarrassment of the once most influential official in the city, one must remember how Igor Albin himself played tricks in the civil service chairs. The most striking episodes of his career, which Rucriminal.info will describe today, are a real panopticon, as Igor Nikolaevich likes to put it.

A panopticon is a collection of inexplicable, shocking and bizarre objects, in a figurative sense - a gathering of something incredible and creepy (explanatory

Dictionary by Tatyana Efremova).

How, where and why the former laboratory assistant from Karaganda and adjunct of the police school Igor Slyunyaev burst into the orbit of Russian politics, history is silent. In the offices of Smolny there was a version that Slyunyaev’s wife was once closely acquainted with or even related to the wife of Dmitry Medvedev, but this “Khlestakov story” seems to have been invented by Slyunyaev himself. In his youth, the aspiring policeman defended his dissertation “Criminal Transfer of Capital.” Probably, a deep understanding of the essence of the subject studied helped Slyunyaev set off on his career path and the vast expanses of the country. He worked in Omsk and Altai, was involved in organizing construction teams, agrarian policy, transport, banking, and road construction. In those years, everyone learned a little, something and somehow. The main recipe for success is to be in the right place at the right time.

“Where are you taking us?.., we can’t see anything! You've probably lost your way, brother, on purpose."

Konstantin Ryleev. Verse "Susanin"

 

In 2007, fate brought Slyunyaev to Kostroma and immediately became the local governor. During the two years of the “Varangian” rule, the public debt of the Kostroma region grew from 3.3 to 9 billion rubles, but at the same time huge amounts of money were invested in projects to replace concrete curbs, which were produced at Igor Slyunyaev’s own plant. The result of the “investment projects” of the work of the new governor was an audit by the Accounts Chamber, the results of which indicated a waste of government money. In 2012, Slyunyaev voluntarily resigned his powers “out of harm’s way,” leaving all residents of the region in bewilderment and a hole in its budget of 11 billion rubles. The region was quickly brought to a dead end.

And the lights of Moscow were waiting for Slyunyaev. Six months after the catastrophic failure in Kostroma, a careless official is suddenly appointed to the post of Minister of Regional Development. This department will be triumphantly liquidated in two years, but this time was enough for Slyunyaev to “distinguish himself.” Instead of traveling around the regions of the country, Slyunyaev began his professional career with a business trip to Cannes, France, where in March 2013 he took part in the International Real Estate Exhibition “MIPIM”. Having been impressed by the housing stock of the south of France (we will return to them later), upon his return to the Russian Federation, Slyunyaev raised housing and communal services tariffs in the regions of Russia so much that for the first time in the history of the country he publicly infuriated Putin, who diagnosed Albin at a personal meeting in the Kremlin: “You Are you crazy or what?"

In the housing and communal services sector of St. Petersburg, the career of Slyunyaev will soon continue, who in October 2014 changed his last name - in October 2014 he turned into “Igor Albin”. It is worth noting that his son Alexander also has a stepname - Khotin. Perhaps the desire to change surnames is their family “trick”. Or they are simply hiding from each other. Although in St. Petersburg they say that at meetings in Smolny, officials at that time were seated alphabetically. Slyunyaev was sitting in the far corner. The change of surname helped him move closer to the governor. What you won't do for the sake of being close to power...

 

But there is another version - in 2014, Albin was hiding not only from residents of Russian regions and Kostroma who remembered him with unkind words. In 2012-2014, the FSB Directorate for the Primorsky Territory opened a criminal case about the theft from the budget of more than 1 billion rubles, allocated by the Ministry of Regional Development, but never reaching the region. Albin was involved in this case as one of the defendants in the theft, was interrogated by officers of the FSB SEB in St. Petersburg, and a search was carried out in his apartment on Kirochnaya Street. The case did not come to an arrest then, but the case materials remained in the archives on Liteiny Prospekt.

"Grew up It’s not difficult to manage, but it’s completely useless.” Alexander II

Today Igor Albin-Slyunyaev writes in his telegram channel: “looking at some industry and regional personnel decisions, the old, undeservedly forgotten term “kakistocracy” comes to mind - this is a management system run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens " It’s difficult to say who exactly Slyunyaev is referring to now (Beglova, Mishustina, Bortnikova, Shoigu?). But if you remember where and how Albin himself worked after being expelled from Moscow, it is difficult to argue with his words. The St. Petersburg period of Albin’s work is the most striking example of “kakistocracy”.

So, in November 2104, by some incredible miracle, having taken the post of vice-governor of St. Petersburg, the wanderer, who changed his last name, immediately managed to “win the love” of the inhabitants of the cradle of the Russian empire, which survived more than one monarch, but was almost destroyed by one careless official . To begin with, Albin-Slyunyaev traditionally raised all tariffs for housing and communal services, suggested that the citizens themselves solve the problem of snow removal with shovels in their hands, and on the issue of traffic jams he publicly sent them all to the “heavenly office.” It is worth noting Albin-Slyunyaev’s incredible luck at his new duty station: when deputies of the Legislative Assembly literally catch him stealing snow removal equipment, which led to multimillion-dollar damage to the city budget, our hero so cleverly confuses his tracks that he will not even be arrested again.

Dozens of articles have been written about Albin-Slyunyaev’s adventures on the banks of the Neva and his possible patrons, but it’s worth dwelling on the main scam of this period in more detail. Of course, this is the story of the construction of the Zenit stadium - the famous Baklan Arena, the construction of which, for some unknown reasons, was entrusted to Albin-Slyunyaev at the end of his career as a St. Petersburg official. At that time, housing and communal services worker Albina-Slyunyaev had no experience or construction skills, but who bothered? After all, managing is not difficult and absolutely pointless. Albin worked according to this covenant all his life.

 

“We are full of hopes, in our dreams we make plans, The project in our fantasies was undoubtedly cool. But the ubiquitous cormorants will fly to us, And in essence, they will crap everything deliciously” (Sergey Shnurov).

The Zenit Arena stadium in Putin's hometown was supposed to become not just the number one sports arena in the country, but also a new political symbol of Russia as it prepared for the most ambitious World Cup in football history. For the official Albin-Slyunyaev, participation in such a project was the main bet in the political casino: the successful and timely completion of the construction of the stadium under his leadership would neutralize all his failures and corruption crimes of the past. Albin-Slyunyaev took his work seriously: he began to come to meetings with a combat pistol, and hired local blogger Nikolai Kamnev, who even wore the uniform of an SS Standartenführer, to play the role of his PR man. This creative union will subsequently lead our Susanin to a search for sacred meanings and wanderings through occult places of power, where he will come to the conclusion that “the greatest mystic of our time was Adolf Hitler.” But let's return to the construction of the stadium.

From 2013 to April 2015, the post of construction vice-governor of St. Petersburg was held by Marat Oganesyan, who was removed from office and arrested after a certain St. Petersburg official wrote a denunciation against him. Oganesyan will later say at the court hearing: “I, unlike some of the authors of the denunciation on which this case was initiated, have not changed my last name and do not intend to change.” I wonder who he meant?

Albin-Slyunyaev took Oganesyan’s chair and began to act. By this time, the general contractor of the stadium, the Transstroy company, had already completed more than 40% of the construction work worth more than 15 billion rubles. And by July 2016, the facility’s readiness was 86%. Albin-Slyunyaev noticed that the high-profile project was moving very confidently towards the final without his help, and decided to intervene. First, he demanded that the contractor independently attract 4 billion rubles of additional investment (since the city supposedly has no money), then he arranged as many as 34 inspections by the Federal Migration Service (what if people work at the site without registration?), then he demanded that the management of the Transstroy company be changed (they did not understand the hints about financial cooperation), and finally, Slyunyaev brought “his” contractors to the stadium - as many as 24 organizations at once, the largest of which, Metrostroy, had no experience in construction work of this level. And then, to begin with, her contracts included work worth 900 million rubles, previously completed by Transstroy, which Slyunyaev decided to simply squeeze out of the project.

 

In July 2016, at meetings in Smolny, Slyunyaev (with a pistol in a holster) began to openly raise the issue of changing the general contractor. The deadline for the project’s completion was approaching, and the author of the dissertation on “criminal transfer of capital” decided to take on the remaining 14% of the work. On July 13, taking advantage of the fact that the governor of St. Petersburg went on a business trip, Slyunyaev went all in NK, giving the go-ahead for an armed raider takeover of the stadium: employees of the contracting organizations he brought in went on strike, using heavy construction equipment to block the cars of the Transstroy management, and blocked the exits from the stadium. The next morning, all contracts with Transstroy were terminated, which completed almost 90% of the work, but suffered losses in the amount of 7.8 billion rubles.

What happened next is a well-known story. The cost of the stadium under the leadership of Slyunyaev increased to 50 billion rubles - this is an absolute world record for the construction of sports facilities. The contractors he brought in went bankrupt, and criminal cases were opened against the remaining ones - for example, Metrostroy. The stadium scoreboard did not work, the roof was leaking. Then Albin-Slyunyaev came up with a version about cormorants, which with their beaks destroyed a unique infrastructure project.

It's time to leave. But here’s the problem - rumors about Albin-Slyunyaev’s “exploits” had already spread throughout the country, no one anywhere wanted to hire him for civil service. Our hero's patrons hid him for a short time in the Gazprombank office, where he, as they say, was bored and toiled, preparing for new wanderings.

Albin-Slyunyaev devoted a huge amount of his free time to “scientific work”: for example, listening to the songs of the group “Boney M”, he saw the coincidence of the words of their song with the canonical text of Psalm 137 of David. This was a sign, Slyunyaev decided, and he left for Israel, where he wandered aimlessly and read Omar Khayyam, a quote from which he recently published in his Telegram channel: “You came into the world naked, you came without money and material things, you will leave without money and material things.” of things. So why is there so much greed, so much pride, so much evil, so much envy, so much hatred, so much resentment, so much selfishness?

Who are these words about?

Do you remember the story about how the young Minister of Regional Development went to Cannes? By the way, at that time the state, thanks to Albin, spent more than 100 million rubles on visiting the MIPIM real estate exhibition - this is the cost of flights, accommodation, pavilion and decorations. And it doesn’t matter that not a single contract or agreement on investment in Russia was signed at that forum. The main thing is that I managed to see Cannes. And not only Albin. His longtime ally, and now his new wife, Maria Shapkina, also loved Cannes. She and her boss went a long way - through the forests of the Kostroma region, the fire and water of the Ministry of Regional Development, and the copper pipes of St. Petersburg. At the end of the thorny path of the faithful official, it was her parents (pensioners A. S. Shapkina, born March 18, 1952, and V. G. Shapkina, born July 17, 1952) who ended up registering the apartment at the address: 78 Avenue de Lerins - BatB - 06400 CANNES, FRANCE. It was not for nothing that they went to the exhibition. By the way, knowing a little about the habits of our hero, we can assume that in France he will also change his surname.

Timofey Grishin

Source: www.rucriminal.info