7 Feb 2020 19:24

Russian Deputy Chief of General Staff Arslanov accused of embezzling from state contracts for radio deliveries

MOSCOW. Feb 7 (Interfax) - The Russian Armed Forces' Deputy Chief of General Staff Col. Gen. Khalil Arslanov, who is accused of massive fraud, stole the state money allocated for the delivery of radios to the army, an investigator said at a bail hearing by the 235th garrison military court on Friday.

"The preliminary investigation agencies are accusing Arslanov of having conspired and stolen budget funds [allocated] under state contracts for the work involving [first] prototype supervision, and, second, delivering R-187 P1 radios to the Russian Armed Forces, worth in total no less than 6.5 billion rubles," the investigator said.

As reported earlier, Arslanov has been indicted on two counts of especially massive fraud amounting in aggregate to nearly 6.7 billion rubles "for misappropriating 191,437,536 rubles and at least 6.5 billion rubles while implementing a state contract."

The filings indicate that the criminal case in which Arslanov is charged was opened on August 6, 2013 and concerns embezzlement in concluding a state contract for the servicing and maintenance of special military hardware. The investigation deadline is currently set at February 6, 2020, as follows from the court filings.

The list of suspects in the case includes chief of the directorate of contracts for enhancing the technical foundation of the Armed Forces control system Pavel Kutakhov, chief of the 1st directorate of the Armed Forces Main Communications Directorate Maj. Gen. Alexander Ogloblin, plus a number of suspects detained in 2017 - former General Director of Voentelecom Alexander Davydov, his first deputy Oleg Savitsky, his advisor Dmitry Semiletov, and ErSiAi General Director Tatyana Ilyina.

Sources told the media that the investigation had been able to prosecute Arslanov owing to cooperation from other suspects.