Two IT overseeing officers of Federal Treasury arrested till mid-July - court
MOSCOW. May 31 (Interfax) - Moscow's Khoroshevsky District Court has put Federal Treasury deputy head Sergei Guralnikov and head of a Federal Treasury department Sergei Pavlov under arrest until July 10 on the counts of embezzlement, court press secretary Olga Litsareva told Interfax.
"The court has put Sergei Guralnikov and Sergei Pavlov under arrest until July 10," Litsareva said on Wednesday.
Chairman of the Sirius IT company's board of directors Roman Pavlov and Sirius Executive Director Alexander Litvinov were also put under arrest.
The defendants are charged with fraud and embezzlement, Litsareva said, adding that the court ordered the arrests on May 13.
"Lawyers have appealed every arrest order," Litsareva said. In her words, the Moscow City Court will hear the appeals on May 31.
The newspaper Kommersant reported the arrest of the suspects on Wednesday and said that Sirius had been a contractor of the Federal Treasury for long and earned at least 195 million rubles in the past few years for the delivery of servers and the provision of technical support.
The Federal Treasury has declined to comment on the arrest of Guralnikov, who oversees the IT block, and IT department head Pavlov, the newspaper said.
"The law enforcement agencies might have been curious about the fact that Roman Pavlov's companies have gained numerous governmental contracts with the Federal Treasury, where his brother, Sergei Pavlov, is in charge of the IT department," a large IT company's top manager told Kommersant. Another two IT market sources told the newspaper that the Pavlovs, Roman and Sergei, were brothers.
The newspaper referred to SPARK Interfax saying that the companies either controlled by or affiliated to Roman Pavlov and Alexander Litvinov had earned at least 195 million rubles from various departments of the Federal Treasury under governmental contracts for the delivery of computers, hardware and technical support services. Sirius posted 2.6-billion-ruble earnings in 2015. According to SPARK Interfax, the group receives most of the funds through Krasnodar-based Sirius JSC, whose ultimate beneficiaries are Roman Pavlov (90%) and Alexander Litvinov (10%) via Intellect Technology LLC, the newspaper said.
"All those people were born in Krasnodar; they got acquainted when Sergei Guralnikov was the head of the local treasury office," a top manager of a large IT company told Kommersant. Guralnikov headed the Krasnodar territorial department of the Federal Treasury in the period from 2001 till 2010, and Pavlov was in charge of the department's IT division since 2003, the newspaper said, referencing open sources.