Chairman of the Accounting Chamber Sergey Stepashin
Photo: Alexey Kudenko
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The Case of the Accounting Chamber
// Inspector wanted to take part in deal with Lockheed
A new version of the corruption scandal in the Accounting Chamber of Russia has emerged. Chamber inspector Yury Gaidukov, a lawyer and go-between, has been arrested in the case. OAO V.P. Glushko Energomash Scientific Production Association claims that he extorted ˆ7 million from it not to make changes to the results of the company's inspection, but to unfreeze the foreign economic activities of the joint enterprise RD Amross, which supplies rocket engines to the Lockheed Martin Co.
Chief inspector Yury Gaidukov was arrested on court order along with Nikolay Serykh, head of the federal consultative bureau Lord Enterprises, and Alan Gogichaev, co-owner of Carven restaurant. They were charged by the Prosecutor General's investigative committee with demanding bribes from the management of Energomash. Head of the Accounting Chamber Sergey Stepashin initially confirmed that they had demanded bribes to make changes to the results of the company's audit. Later, however, he changed his point of view and practically came out in defense of the inspector. “As for his direct involvement [in extortion], it is a big question for me,” he said.
At Energomash, they have insisted since the very beginning of the case that they neither offered nor gave any bribes and are not sure of what Gaidukov and his accomplices have been arrested for. After a military court turned down Gaidukov's lawyers' petition to free him from custody (Gaidukov was on temporary attachment from the Defense Ministry) last Monday, Energomash provided its own explanation of the incident, which differed substantially from what had appeared in the press.
Head of the Energomash public relations center Yury Korotkov told Kommersant that the audit carried out by the Accounting Chamber verified the legality and efficiency of the use of federal property at the company. The auditors were more interested in the company's foreign economic activity, however, Korotkov said, especially in the work of the Russian-American joint enterprise RD Amross, which was founded in 1997 and is a resident of the United States. “It was obviously beyond the authority of the inspectors, since the company is American, not Russian,” claimed Korotkov. Energomash was unable to provide documents on that company within the time demanded and the Energomash management had a meeting with Accounting Chamber Chairman Sergey Stepashin and auditor Sergey Abramov to inform them better of the company's programs and explain the goals of the RD-180 project, a rocket engine that has been imported to the Lockheed Corp. in the U.S. for ten years. “The meeting was more than constructive,” Korotkov noted.
Stepashin, however, stated at a press conference last Friday that he and his employees experienced “pressure from all sides” during the audit of Energomash. “That's very strange,” commented Korotkov, “since the Americans provided the Accounting Chamber the results of audits back to 2004-2005.”
At Energomash, they say that the affair did not end with a single audit. The Federal Technical and Export Supervision Service, which the Accounting Chamber allegedly consulted during its audit, discontinued the license for RD Amross' export of rocket engines, as a result of which, the enterprise “lost several tens of millions of dollars and a number of profitable contracts because of delays due to the absence of a license,” according to Korotkov, who described the situation as being “squeezed in a financial vice.”
At the same time, June of this year, Nikolay Serykh contacted the company. His firm has been a consultant to the Energomash board of directors in the late 1990s. He met with Energomash first deputy general director Dmitry Pakhomov and, according to Pakhomov, offered to solve all the problems with the auditors for ˆ7 million. Serykh wrote that sum on a piece of paper.
The management of Energomash contacted the government and Russian president Vladimir Putin after its export license was returned in August, and then contacted Department K (the anticorruption division) of the FSB. Serykh was taken into custody after he was given ˆ1 million in marked bills. Later, Inspector Gaidukov and Gogichaev, co-owner of the restaurant they met in, were also taken into custody.
At Energomash, they think that only Gaidukov could have created the problems experienced by their joint enterprise. “At the end of the 1990s, he was the general director of the Russian Ministry of Justice's Federal Agency for the Legal Protection of the Results of Intellectual Activity for Military, Special or Dual Purposes and, as a civil servant, was simultaneously a member of the board of Energomash. No exports could be made without his signature. He was very well informed as to how profitable project RD-180 is,” noted Korotkov.
Gaidukov's lawyers were unavailable for comment yesterday. Earlier, they told Kommersant that was the victim of a provocation by the special serviced and Energomash. Auditor Abramov, who headed the Energomash audit, also declined to comment. “Stories like that show that they tried to contrive a certain combination but they couldn't get out of the water dry,” said Serykh's lawyer Viktor Badyan. “By trying to lay the blame on our clients, the management of the enterprise was trying to evade their responsibility. The violations they committed are serious and Chairman of the Accounting Chamber Sergey Stepashin has said so.” Last Friday, Stepashin did not specify the violations uncovered in the audit of Energomash, saying only that they concerned “the accounting of intellectual property and high technology.”
Company Profile
RD Amross
RD Amross LLC is a joint venture founded in 1997 by Energomash and the American Pratt & Whitney Co. (a division of United Technologies) on an equity basis. It makes main-stage RD-180 rocket engines for the first stages of Atlas III and Atlas V carrier rockets at Energomash's facilities in Khimki, outside Moscow. The RD-180 won a competition in 1996 for the development and, in 1997, Atlas producer Lockheed Martin reached a preliminary agreement with RD Amross on the delivery of a total of 101 engines for $1 billion. They concluded a contract for the delivery of 50 engines as a start. By July 2007, 41 engines had been delivered, 15 of which were used in launches. It was announced at that time that a new contract would be signed in September for another 53 engines to be delivered to the United States with an option on another 16 engines. However, the license to sell engines to the U.S. was invalid between May and August of this year.
Yury Senatorov
All the Article in Russian as of Sep. 27, 2007
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