Audit Chamber says Rostelecom spent too much on business trips in 2009-2010
MOSCOW. Jan 23 (Interfax) - The Russian Audit Chamber on Tuesday unveiled the results of its audit into the legality and expediency of business trips abroad for Telecoms Ministry employees in 2009-2011. The results were approved by the Audit Chamber collegium on May 25 2012.
The auditors found a substantial share of expenses were not reimbursed by the ministry. Government owned company OJSC Rostelecom also sent its employees on business trips and the Audit Chamber found that its trip expenses were unjustifiably high. However, the Chamber did not discover any evidence of Rostelecom funding the trips of Telecom Ministry officials.
Rostelecom considers the Audit Chamber's conclusion of inefficient spending on trips abroad to be erroneous, Kira Kiryukhina, a company spokesman, told Interfax. Rostelecom is a commercial organization that carries out its job in accordance with the budget approved by its board, which is elected by the shareholders, she said.
The auditors found that in 2009-2010 the Telecoms Ministry (then led by Igor Schegolev) repeatedly asked the heads of Rostelecom at the time, Konstantin Solodukhin and Anton Kolpakov, to assist in resolving organizational issues related to trips abroad by ministry officials.
Rostelecom told the Audit Chamber that it did not know anything about ministry officials making trips at the company's expense, it said it only helped with consultations on accommodation, transport and organization of meeting and seeing off at airports.
The audit "established several instances of trips made abroad by ministry employees without adequate financial provision for expenses from the federal budget," Audit Chamber materials show. However, the primary documents confirming official expenses are missing. The Telecoms Ministry told the Audit Chamber that they paid for the trip expenses with their own funds, but they did not present any supporting evidence.
A cross-check by the Chamber into Rostelecom revealed that the company "repeatedly allowed unjustifiably high spending on foreign business trips." For example, in a trip to the Winter Olympics in Vancouver in 2010 the average expenses per employee were 2.4 million rubles. In addition 25 of the 48 people that were on the Moscow-Vancouver-Moscow charter flights were not Rostelecom employees.
Among the passengers of that charter plane, organized by Rostelecom via the tourist agency Valnetur was the then director of the Telecom Ministry's administration department (current head of Rossvyaz) Oleg Dukhovnitskiy, Rostelecom minority shareholders Konstantin Malofeev (controls around 10%), his father Valery Malofeev, brother Dmitry Malofeev, father-in-law Mikhail Vilter and former prosecutor general Yuri Skuratov (his son Dmitry Skuratov is a lawyer for the K. Malofeev fund Marshall Capital). Rostelecom spent 14 million rubles on the flights.
The company spent another 15 million rubles on tickets to Olympic events, although this was not envisaged in the purpose of the business trips.
Average expenses per head for Rostelecom employees ranged from 3.3 million rubles for trips to Ljubljana, 997,000 rubles for Paris and 1.5 million for Havana.
The Audit Chamber says Rostelecom did not send official replies to Telecom Ministry requests for help in organizing trips (the ministry also made the same requests to MTS, Vimpelcom and other market participants).
Rostelecom has since 2009 been working to optimize business trip expenses, Kiryukhina said. "We have been able to significantly reduce these expenses, including through the use of information technology - regional meetings are held by video conference," she said.
