Garbage King Polovinkin

Source: www.rucriminal.info

The first part of the series about the fascinating business of the Russian garbage "king" Andrey Polovinkin has ended. The "king" has officially been given the status of "fraudster". Judge of the Shcherbinsky District Court of Moscow A. Kipriyanov passed a sentence in the criminal case (UID 77R RS0034-02-2024-018415-84). The defendant was charged with Article 159, Part 4 - fraud on an especially large scale. In the first instance, the case was considered on September 4. The leniency of the sentence, however, is somewhat disconcerting: Polovinkin received a suspended sentence of one and a half years. Was it worth trumpeting in all the Russian media that the "king" was ready to flee the country and hide from the investigation in Spain? And that he was almost taken off the plane, replacing a European date with his ex-wife and children, who have been living there for a long time, with interrogations at the Investigative Committee. With a subsequent year and a half of wearing a bracelet with a tracker on his ankle? In general, now the "king" can breathe a sigh of relief. And switch his attention to a territory "under his patronage" that is much more loyal to his schemes - to the Krasnodar Territory. Where an epic hard-household-waste battle is currently unfolding between Andrei Borisovich and the Kuban bureaucratic clans interested in the garbage collapse on the one hand, and the residents of the near-polygon cities and villages of Kuban, where Polovinkin has thoroughly left his "investments" on the other. Details at Rucriminal.info.

If any of the representatives of the Southern Italian mafia were able to give an inspiring speech on the Russian waste reform to the Krasnodar Region leadership, the conclusion would have been: "Cosi i rifiuti poccono diventare una fonte di guadagno. Ci sono buone opzioni per fare soldi in questo modo - In this way, waste can become a source of income. There are good options for earning money this way." "Dilettante," - that's how the regional leadership would have assessed the nondescript (compared to the Kuban) Neapolitan waste experience, which for some reason was called a major crisis in 2007-2009. At that time, all of Europe was watching the multi-story mountains of waste "burying" Naples and a number of other cities in the Campania region. The mafia, which controlled business, was solving its problems harshly. The country's authorities were trying to counter them with something. Russian media, looking for any failures in the European side, did not pass by, issuing colorful, hopeless reports. Italian landfills were burning, people went out to rallies, waved banners and spat in the direction of the helpless prime minister, the enlisted army bravely dug through the garbage, trying to dig out entrances and sidewalks. A juicy description of that crisis eventually made it to Wikipedia. For those interested, go there for details.

History, as we know, develops in a spiral. Years later, the problematic "garbage spiral", having made a turn, dug into the body of the Krasnodar Territory. And compared to the current garbage collapse in Kuban, that "Crisi dei rifiuti" - the garbage crisis in Campania, is more like a good children's coloring book. Then in Italy, the authorities of the region, the country tried to resist the mafia. In Russia, there is no mafia. There are garbage "investors" who work in close corrupt ties with the Kuban authorities. It seems that this is the only difference from the Italian mafia schemes. Otherwise, there is a complete similarity between the Neapolitan Dons and our "garbage kings" acting in the company of Kuban officials. In particular, both then in Italy and now in Krasnodar Krai, the main argument in pushing through the "garbage" interests of "prominent investors" is blackmail. "King" Polovinkin, together with his garbage "princes", "guardsmen" and "PR-maids of honor" in fact blackmail his own accomplices - Kuban officials. Who, being extremely interested, for a long time point-blank saw neither the problem itself, nor the growing civil "garbage protest" movement in the region. Until their Moscow curators "hinted" to them that something had to be done about this, which had become a very powerful protest. It is not right when videos of fighters for the southern ecology get two million views, and almost all residents of municipalities adjacent to the garbage dumps become protest "ecologists". Without the slightest respect for either the corrupt municipal government or the strange regional government, and, what is even more seditious, losing faith even in federal structures, where people turned for help.

A little background, without which it is impossible to understand the current situation. The garbage reform in Kuban officially began a year later than the all-Russian start. Although the first steps to transform the industry in the region were attempted long before that. Even at the end of Tkachev's governorship, the region was going to allocate 30 million rubles to develop an effective territorial scheme for handling solid municipal waste. An institute was determined that would take on this difficult task. The calculations had to take into account not only the number of residents, the differences between urban and village volumes of solid municipal waste, but also the specific southern seasonality, the need for the need to conserve resort and recreational resources, etc.

Soon Tkachev moved to work at the Ministry of Agriculture. Kondratyev, who replaced him, acted like a young male lion who had taken away the pride of an old lion - he "strangled all of Tkachev's "lion cubs" - he rejected all of his predecessor's initiatives as unnecessary and harmful. Including the idea of ​​​​preparing territorial schemes by specialists.

But since the demands for preparing the reform came from the Kremlin, and there was no money for any scientific developments, the region decided to take an unusual path. The then Minister of Fuel and Energy Complex and Housing and Public Utilities of the region, Alexander Voloshin, hastily instructed his subordinates to prepare a territorial scheme - not great "experts" in their field. They sent requests to municipalities, where the level of knowledge of officials was even lower. As a result, young municipal bureaucratic talents, from the “effective teams” recruited at that time under the “Kondratiev gun”, began to send data that was often very far from reality.

The accuracy of the parameters could be described in two words – “off the cuff”.

In the region, they still have no idea even about the real population of the cities and villages (difficult to calculate migration flows are heading south, and there is the same uncontrolled outflow of population from a number of Kuban city-districts to the capitals). In the coastal areas, the real volumes of garbage in general cannot be calculated more or less accurately during the season. Hordes of vacationers simply cannot be calculated even with an accuracy of a million. Most of the owners of resort guest houses, private mini-hotels do not intend to legalize, knowing that legalization will be followed by a bribe and kickback-squeeze “raid” on the part of administration employees, law enforcement officers and numerous inspection offices. How can a "highly professional" Kuban official determine the actual volumes of garbage? In general, the ministry estimated that the region should have the same volumes as the Russian Federation average - about 2.5 cubic meters of garbage per year, multiplied by the approximate number of people. Based on this approximation, a territorial scheme was created and tariffs were "carefully" calculated. When this chaotic tariff result was presented to Kondratyev, he almost fainted. Veniamin Ivanovich was horrified at that moment by the prospect of receiving a 6-million curse from all the residents of the region entrusted to him. The research of the regional ministry of fuel and energy complex and housing and communal services of the region had to be remade into something more or less sane. And although the first tenders for regional operators of the eleven Kuban "garbage" zones were negotiated in 2018-2019, the reform itself, which began in the Russian Federation in 2019, started in the region in 2020. The Kuban governor persuaded the Kremlin to postpone it. It would seem that such a year of "head start" made it possible to build an effective scheme for managing and monitoring the processes. The regional REC (under the permanent leadership of the unsinkable head of the department of state regulation of tariffs Sergei Milovanov) had to clearly and carefully recalculate tariffs for garbage collection, and the Ministry of Fuel and Energy Complex and Housing and Public Utilities decided on the regulations for monitoring and checking the work of regional operators. Ideally, everything should have been exactly like this. But in practice, it turned out that no one could control anything and did not particularly want to. Which allowed some governor's bosses, who through intermediaries "sat on garbage", to see a good, practically undetectable source of considerable shadow income. The first to appreciate the transformation of waste flows into money was the head of the Krasnoarmeysky district, Yuri Vasin.

A small village dump was located at the borders of the district center, the village of Poltavskaya. It was operated by the municipal enterprise MP "ZhKH", organized back in the distant post-coup 1992. The village dump coped with its tasks quite well. Its magical transformation into a gold mine began in 2011, when Yuri Vasin became the head of the district. Already in 2012, his relatives created OOO MP "ZhKH", where MP is no longer a "Municipal Enterprise", but a "Multi-Profile Enterprise of Housing and Utilities" - a private office. And soon the dump unexpectedly became private from a municipal one, significantly expanding its borders, capturing, in fact, part of the Kuban rice system. The "garbage land" was leased to private owners for 49 years. And all the contracts for waste removal were received by Vasin's family-owned Lotos LLC. A family-friendly waste scheme was built. The prosecutor's office did not see a conflict of interest, although among the founders, the founders of the municipal enterprise "ZhKH" were... Vladimir Vasin, the head's brother, and Natalya Vakulenko, the head's daughter. The prosecutor's office was not moved by the license for a solid waste landfill issued by the regional Rosprirodnadzor. Although there was not a single legal basis for issuing this piece of paper. Those wishing to organize such a business, in order to obtain such licenses for a solid waste landfill, must carry out mandatory preliminary work stipulated by Russian regulations: develop and coordinate design documentation, obtain a sanitary conclusion regarding land plots, equip a system for collecting filtrates and evaporation ponds, take care about the waterproof layer (now this requirement is even stricter - it is necessary to arrange special substrates). In a word - to implement a set of measures to prevent filtrate and other poisons from entering the soil, water, and atmosphere. At the same time, explain why and on what basis the waste landfill was "stuck" between rice fields and irrigation canals.

It was necessary to provide sorting lines. The enterprise operating the landfill should have bulldozers, other special vehicles, trained personnel.

In general, the list of "obligations" is not small. The garbage reform that was launched, which significantly increased garbage tariffs for the population, guaranteed cleanliness, maximum use of garbage for recycling, and the "smell of violets" from the landfills. The regulations were prescribed precisely for these bright goals. At the time of receiving the license for the landfill, the Municipal Enterprise "ZhKH" had... a couple of bulldozers on lease, land on lease, issued with the assistance of the head of the district, and a strange license, for the issuance of which the regional office had no grounds. After receiving it, a rumor began to wander around the village that explained everything: they were talking about a very likely bribe. The village "experts" even named the amount - 30 million. At that time, more than half a million dollars. Probably, another question should not surprise: how did the Poltava landfill later manage to get into the GRORO - the state register of waste disposal facilities? After all, the requirements there are even more serious. To enter the register, it is necessary to present documents that, in addition to the above, must indicate measures to isolate the walls of the landfill, calculate the angles for the flow of filtrate and other "details" that are still missing at the landfill in Poltavskaya. But even in this case, Rosprirodnadzor for some reason “did not notice” the complete discrepancy between the landfill’s reality and its own requirements. The Poltava landfill joined the State Regional Organization for Supervision of Natural Resource Usage in 2016.

In 2018, the license was reissued. And the “registrators” from Rosprirodnadzor also had no questions.

Having received all the necessary documents, the family business expanded. Garbage began to be transported to the main landfill of the Crimean zone in Poltava not only from Krasnoarmeysky, but also from neighboring districts - Krymsky, Slavyansky. In fact, until recently a small village garbage dump, turned into a completely official inter-district solid municipal waste landfill. And although this site did not comply with any environmental standards, there was a piece of paper from the Ministry of Natural Resources, which means that the Poltava landfill has become a very attractive commodity on the garbage market for serious Russian players in this “field”. The village names the approximate amount of the "transition" of the garbage business of the Kuban official's family to the empire of the Russian garbage "king" Andrey Polovinkin: from 300 to 500 million rubles. Although more modest rumor-mongers say "only" 100 million. It seemed that the deal, whatever the price, looked more than strange: after all, the new owner of the Municipal Enterprise "ZhKH" paid his millions for... two bulldozers on lease and for the leased land (the rent, by the way, is very lenient - 6 thousand rubles per year per hectare. It turns out inexpensive for 4 plots of 32 hectares, of which 9 hectares is the landfill itself, and the rest is used for occasional burials of, say, fluorescent lamps or animal skins, which is basically illegal, but in the specific Kuban conditions, none of the authorities care), and for an extremely dubious license. However, as in many of his other garbage companies, Andrey Polovinkin himself was, as it were, outside the deal. Officially, the new owner of the LLC MP "ZhKH" of the Krasnoarmeysky district was Alexander Viktorovich Markov.

Although the connections here were easy to trace. If the region had inquired about what kind of investor was entering the territory and what to expect from him, it would have been easy to find out. The owner of MP "ZhKH" Markov is the director of another LLC - "Gelion", the founder of which is Andrey Polovinkin, whose other company "Viva Trans" received multi-billion contracts from budgetary organizations of Moscow and the Moscow region. The Polovinkin family owns the waste processing plant "Grunt Eko" in Chulkovo (an environmental assessment found that in the nearby Mikhailovskaya Sloboda, the maximum permissible concentration of ammonia was exceeded by 6 times, hydrogen sulfide by 31). The Polovinkins' family industrial enterprise "Viva Trans" was already considered one of the most closed structures on the waste market. It seemed that if Markov's colleagues-comrades-accomplices were running the waste business in such a way that all this activity was constantly at the center of Russian eco-scandals, the regional leadership should have organized at least gentle control over their Poltava "investment project" from the first days. But... In general, the updated structure built by Polovinkin around the Poltava solid municipal waste landfill looked like this: The regional operator is OOO "Ekotekhprom", it has a waste disposal contract with OOO MP "ZhKH" (the General Director and main owner of "Ekotekhprom" is Polovinkin's trusted person - Igor Chebyshev). In the scheme The Chisty Gorod office registered in Anapa operates and transports waste from five districts of Kuban that are part of the Crimean zone. Polovinkin was not formally listed as a founder of any of these offices.

It should be noted that the second weakest point of the Kuban Governor Veniamin Kondratyev is his ears. He flows like jelly in the sun when he is told the amounts of future investments. In the case of the landfill in the Krasnoarmeysky District, Andrei Polovinkin voiced bright waste prospects to Kondratyev at the level of 5 billion rubles, drawing pictures of powerful waste sorting and recycling of secondary waste. In addition to environmental magic, they talked about receiving huge additional income for the municipal and regional budgets. And in all the negotiation processes with the regional authorities, Polovinkin, judging by the signs printed by the governor's highly professional specialists in printing signs, positioned himself as an "investor". And Kondratyev negotiated only with him, and not with the formal owners of the landfill business. It has been like this since the "nineties": it does not matter who the formal owner is. It is important who "controls" the business and actually owns it.

 

Despite the benefits that are being painted for the region, for some reason the promised abundance of tax revenues did not happen. And in general, it turned out that OOO MP "ZhKH" is poor, and barely eks out an existence. For 2021, revenue was 51 million rubles. Net loss was 5.3 million rubles. And in 2023, according to SPARK, the loss already amounted to 33,656,000 rubles. Well, pure philanthropists, not sparing themselves and their wallets, for the people's garbage benefit.

 

There was no talk of any breakthroughs in the matter of creating hundreds of new jobs. The creation of modern enterprises for recycling waste glass, metal, paper, and plastic has not advanced at all. It is even somehow awkward to talk about a cosmic jump in taxes.

But the damage was considerable. The landfill itself is located among rice paddies. Anyone familiar with the cultivation of this crop knows that the basis of agricultural technology here is water. The paddies are connected by canals. And the landfill itself is located right in the heart of the rice system in the south of the country. It was simply impossible to cut off the toxic filtrate emitted by the landfill from the adjacent rice systems (although the Kuban "inspectors" have repeatedly tried to prove the opposite for some reason).

According to Russian standards, a sanitary zone of 1 km should be created around the solid waste landfill. The regional "natural controllers" drew a sanitary zone of 0 meters wide. Zero!

 

The residents of the village have become more than worried about the outrageous situation. After all, Polovinkin and his plenipotentiaries were not going to do anything that was required by the standards for the arrangement of such landfills. The activists found out and voiced the nightmarish data on the filtrate generously flowing directly into the rice systems of Kuban. There are clear formulas for calculating the volume of filtrate that “gives birth” to the body of the landfill (those who wish can calculate it themselves, using the formula from SP 32.13330.2018, paragraph 7.2). In Poltavskaya, they substituted their source data and calculated: the volume of annual filtrate is about 20 thousand cubic meters! The “protest” activists set up their posts in order to track how much filtrate is actually pumped out. They found out. One car goes every ten days (this lonely garbage ranger is in the photo). In total, 275 cubic meters of filtrate were removed. This is not even a drop in the ocean. Where does the rest go? It turns out that it either goes into the channels of rice systems or flows into aquifers.

 

The landfill is located in the area of ​​the old bed of the Poltava channel, previously there were floodplains there. But any, even a novice, hydrologist technician will say that there are no completely former channels. Under the ground, there are still aquifers. So, there is no doubt that part of the filtrate goes there.

 

When the public demanded an examination of the groundwater, into which the filtrate penetrated, the data obtained by authorized regional "nature lovers" testified to an unprecedented miracle. In samples taken at the border of the landfill along the course of the groundwater, the content of certain harmful substances exceeded the norms by hundreds of times! Having passed under the garbage dump flowing with filtrate, the groundwater miraculously purified itself ... to the norm. However, the inspectors did not show any desire to drink this "purest" water. Measurements taken near rice paddies showed mercury, arsenic, and lead levels exceeding 30 or more times! And these checks were not only carried out by public figures, they were also carried out by the FSB and Rosprirodnadzor. The garbage collectors were even issued a fine of 800 thousand rubles. For violations found on... 2 hundred square meters!

 

The fact that the Kuban governor ordered the garbage reform to begin in the region a year later than the all-Russian start seemed to have allowed him to avoid a tariff social explosion. The tariffs were made more or less sane. But on the other hand, this year allowed the shadow "investor" Polovinkin to gain "useful" garbage experience. A year was enough to figure out the weak points of the reform. Especially in the matter of the seemingly completely legal customs clearance of garbage revenues.

After all, if the landfill itself has been in the is worth tens of millions, then there must be a "profitable part". In the Krasnodar Territory, the first steps of Polovinkin's garbage empire were the creation of a number of... independent transport enterprises. It would seem, what's the point? The goal was to circumvent some of the financial restrictions provided for by the reform. The main one is the 5-percent profit ceiling when setting tariffs. Ecotechprom has a 10-year contract with the region. And Andrei Borisovich was clearly not satisfied with the 5-percent margin for all these years.

All finances in the industry can be conditionally divided into three components: the maintenance of the regional operator's staff, expenses for the solid municipal waste landfill, and waste transportation. And here the implemented Polovinkin scheme could have been so easily calculated by the regional prosecutor's office or the Investigative Committee (there is no point in talking about the regional Ministry of Fuel and Energy and Housing and Public Utilities as controllers, due to the extreme personal interest of regional officials) that, at first glance, it seems surprising that no one even thought of taking at least a calculator. This device would be enough for a multi-billion dollar criminal case.

Let's look at the salaries of specialists of the LLC MP "ZhKH" - it's pennies. The operation of the landfill is also not a cost component. Especially considering that over all these years there have been no serious cash injections. And nothing has been done that is required by Russian sanitary standards for such facilities. But the profit from transportation is a hard-to-calculate gold mine. Even, as it turned out, not "bottom", but mega-bottom. After all, no 5-percent profit restrictions apply to garbage haulers! And with the mess created by the Kuban authorities in determining the measures for the reform, it turned out to be easy and pleasant to cheat here.

Based on their public data, the revenue of the regional operator for the year is approximately 1.5 billion rubles! Let's divide this revenue by the 50 vehicles that "Ekotekhprom" has in its zone and by 365 days. As a result, one garbage truck brings in 82 thousand a day in revenue, working only on the day shift. And even then they don’t have 50 vehicles… that’s all the math… the promised factories went offshore…. As a result, “Ekotekhprom” began to organize essentially fictitious tenders… for the transportation of garbage volumes. In order to ensure that no outsiders were among the winners, Polovinkin (obviously, not personally, but through his people) buys out a small transport company “Chisty Gorod” in Slavyansk-na-Kubani. He re-registers it in Anapa. “Chisty Gorod” becomes… the only participant in all tenders for the transportation of garbage in the Crimean zone (which includes Krasnoarmeysky, Temryuksky, Krymsky, Slavyansky districts and Anapa). Other carriers, who had been earning money on transportation for years, were thrown out of business. Because the cutoff for "entry" in the bidding was set at 80!!! million rubles, which immediately cut off all small special vehicle fleets. Only "Clean City" wins the bidding. And as a result, it receives up to 85 percent of the "garbage" fees of about 1.5 billion rubles per year. This is how much the "approximate" number of residents of five districts of the Crimean garbage zone pays according to the tariff. It turned out that the solid municipal waste landfill itself is unprofitable. But "independent" garbage haulers can build towers of practically unverifiable money. Of course, Andrey Polovinkin knows how to create the appearance of objectivity in reporting and control. In the Moscow region, considerable experience has been accumulated, so in the Krasnodar region this experience was rolled out without the slightest interference. Although there are approved standards for the accumulation of garbage at solid municipal waste landfills, they are very "plus or minus" in the region. It is believed, for example, that a cubic meter of garbage weighs about 116 kg. The actual average weight of a cubic meter of Kuban garbage is about 80-90 kg. But in Kuban, everyone takes extra! Like "no way". And exactly 116 kg is included in the landfill tariff rates.

When Poltava village eco-activists installed cameras in front of the landfill, and for a long time they counted the actual number of cars entering the landfill (with recording the time and numbers of cars), they found out that in reality, twice as little garbage was brought to the landfill!, than was officially shown in the reporting documents. A landfill is needed to hide such scams with garbage transportation. Which of the inspectors will be able to figure out what is wrong with the already piled-up heaps? Well, they will say that the "body" of the landfill has sunk... Or the garbage has just been heavily compacted... In general, it was precisely through transportation that hundreds of millions of rubles were withdrawn, which were not envisaged by the Russian garbage reform. This is not some pitiful 5 percent profit rate. The protest in Poltavskaya was born out of people’s indignation at the careless attitude towards environmental standards on the part of business owners. The stage of tearful requests to the authorities, writing touching petitions to the local prosecutor’s and investigative committee, the “protests” passed rather quickly. Very soon the obvious became clear: if the head of the district, Yuri Vasin, himself stood at the origins of this trouble (and his family, having sold all this garbage miracle to the “investor”, was, of course, grateful to Polovinkin for his generosity in selling essentially horse business), then Vasin was simply obliged to throw all his official powers into protecting the interests of his garbage follower. Vasin threw them. The picketers, including the wheelchair user, were twisted and taken to the police station by authorized police officers. The indignant men were laid face down in the Kuban roadside weeds and dragged to the police station to intimidate the willful. Pensioners were issued fines significantly exceeding their six-month pensions. Those protesters who had their own business were fined under far-fetched pretexts for tens of millions. Some businesses were even tried to be closed down or taken away through court applications from the on-duty "victims". In general, the "people's power" began to "protect" anti-people interests powerfully. At the same time, Kondratyev himself, as well as the regional prosecutor Tabelsky, for some time actually distanced themselves from all this garbage "trifle". A shift in the bureaucratic minds occurred on the eve of the presidential elections. Since the residents of Poltavskaya launched an unprecedented campaign to fight against the landfill that was killing the village, the problem began to thunder throughout the country. Video appeals to Putin, to Bastrykin and Krasnov, videos about Russian rice poisoned by filtrate, scandals with the seizure by Rospotrebnadzor of batches of Kuban rice poisoned with arsenic and lead on Central Television, which poisoned children who ate porridge, videos about the lawlessness of law enforcement officers and judges serving the authorities, gained millions of views on the Internet. It was then that the governor suddenly became "for the people." Kondratyev began to listen. And, in general, to say the right things, promising every month to close the landfill "if the problems are not corrected within a month." Taking with him companies of PR people and television people, the governor, one might say, began to frequent the landfill. His words about garbage justice, if only they could be set to music. It would have turned out to be a pompous anthem about the fight for the people's garbage happiness.

 

Up until this point, Polovinkina's garbage kingdom had won all the courts easily. Even if, for political reasons, the judges simply needed to find a way to deal with the garbage collectors, they did everything very "lightly". Well, so that the wolves were fed, and the people, who were treated like "sheep", calmed down. It all started in August 2019, when the district court ordered OOO MP "ZhKH Krasnoarmeysky District" to establish a sanitary protection zone for the solid municipal waste landfill, without which the landfill had no right to operate. True, the court did not set any specific deadlines for the execution of the decision, nor a court fine for failure to comply with the court decision, and did not even suspend the operation of the landfill until the causes were eliminated. And everyone (the prosecutor, officials, the governor) were satisfied with everything. Only the people continued to demand justice and compliance with the laws. Therefore, the local government and the district prosecutor tried to sit on two chairs: to maintain relations with the waste business and to convince people that the government is working on the problem, and not making money on it. It didn’t work out so well. For example, on October 7, 2022, the Krasnoarmeysky District Court, at the request of the district prosecutor, allegedly ordered the Municipal Enterprise “Housing and Communal Services” to eliminate the identified violations of environmental legislation. The full list of violations takes up one and a half pages of small text in the court decision. During the consideration of the case, it turned out that the landfill does not have an impermeable layer and the filtrate flows directly into the soil; there is no drainage system, no treatment facilities, no filtrate and biogas collection system, no waste isolation and transfer system... In general, there is nothing except hazardous waste buried in the ground and piled up in the open air. And shadow cash flows that successfully help officials “not to see” the violations. The court issued a decision and ordered the Municipal Enterprise “Housing and Communal Services” to eliminate the violations on the list. But here’s what’s surprising. The prosecutor, who came to court to ask for the elimination of these violations (incompatible with the possibility of conducting a waste business) for some reason forgot to ask the court to suspend the operation of the landfill until all violations were eliminated. That is, the court simply confirmed that there are a lot of violations of the law and did not prohibit the operation of the "ecological bomb", putting the interests of the waste business above human life. The landfill did not have the opportunity to eliminate the violations, this is impossible even if desired. But Polovinkin and Co. do not have such a desire and never had. They usually solve such "minor problems" in a different way. Therefore, after a short time, "their" judge of the Krasnoarmeysky District Court Kravchenko, secretly from the prosecutor and the public, considered the application of the Municipal Enterprise "Housing and Communal Services" to grant a deferment of the execution of the court decision until ... 2026. At that stage of the confrontation, it seemed simply a miracle that the cassation court overturned this strange ruling. One can only assume that such unexpected "courage" was explained by the fact that the judges were also watching the regional TV with the decisive Kondratyev. It seemed that a complete turning point in this war occurred when the governor ordered the preparation of a new zoning scheme that would better correspond to the Kuban garbage realities. And such a scheme was even prepared. It was officially adopted and on July 7, 2023. (According to ministerial order No. 332). And there was no place for the regional operator "Ecotechprom" in it... The Crimean zone was transferred to another regional operator - the Krasnodar "Garbage Collection Company". The new territorial scheme even hung for some time on the website of the Ministry of Fuel and Energy Complex and Housing and Public Utilities of the region. But then two more miracles happened. First: the scheme disappeared from the website. Second: in August of the same 2023, a new co-owner of the business received 20 percent of "Ecotechprom". A certain Yuri Anatolyevich Ragulin. The "powerful" co-owner, to put it mildly, is a stallholder whose income is at the level of 100 thousand per month, who suddenly became the owner of a considerable share of a billion-dollar business, in fact... When law enforcement officers, who finally became interested in the garbage "royal oddities", questioned the participants of this "powerful deal" on signing over a share of the authorized capital to Ragulin, and asked the question: how did this comrade get such a 20-percent happiness, the explanation was touching. It turned out that Ragulin, walking through the expanses of the St. Petersburg Economic Forum (and how did he get there, when the price of "entry" to this pompous forum is much more than a million!) accidentally met the owner of "Ekotekhprom". After drinking coffee, the newly acquainted businessmen decided to run the garbage business together. Considering that Chebyshev and Ragulin had never met in real life, the story turned out to be simply magical. But the residents of Poltavskaya, who have acquired good detective skills over the years of struggle, were interested in a small detail: Ragulin is a classmate and friend of Proshunin, who since 2020 has been the Minister of Fuel and Energy and Housing and Public Utilities in charge of Kuban garbage dumps, then rose to the level of vice-governor in charge of housing and public utilities. Joint photos of the friends are still hanging on the heroes' pages in social networks. Of course, in T-shirts with the president. Such T-shirts are like a talisman for comrades in power.

 

Soon after Ragulin entered the garbage business, the territorial scheme without Ecotechprom disappears, and on December 19, 2023, a new version of the territorial scheme appears on the ministerial website. Where everything is returned to the original version. The Crimean zone, with the Poltava solid waste landfill, is again behind Ecotechprom. The vice-governor himself begins to actively "push" for the prosperity of the dump, rejecting all the arguments of its opponents, and claiming that there is no data on violations of environmental and sanitary standards. It is curious that as soon as Kondratyev sent Proshunin as mayor to Sochi to demolish residential buildings that his predecessor Kopaigorodsky had not yet demolished, and to saw up the land that had not yet been sawed up, Polovinkin lost interest in the joint business with Ragulin. Ragulin's 20% returned "to the royal family". However, it seems, not for long. Polovinkin's interest in Sochi is more than noticeable. The plans for the garbage of the Olympic capital are very interesting. The regional court media, accustomed to "licking" the authorities, hastened to pompously announce the first results of the negotiations between Veniamin Kondratyev and the head of "Viva Trans", investor Andrei Polovinkin. Who told the governor that Sochi would have a waste sorting complex that would be able to accept more than 200 thousand tons per year. Of course, a sorting station for separating waste into inorganic and organic will operate successfully on the territory. And then everything will be processed into environmentally friendly products... "We will take out the garbage in specially packaged bales. Robots will be used in the complex. Automated processes...". In general, as they say in folk tales: "And I was there, drank honey and beer"... Under such delusional and epic statements, the waste sawing in Sochi may well take place. And in such a situation, without the support of the fed mayor, it will not be possible to do... Although this is another topic.

In December 2023, during the "live broadcast" of Governor Kondratyev, it seemed like a victory for the Cossacks. The head of the region said: "The landfill is closed. It is not suspended, it is precisely closed. The landfill will not resume its work - this is my principled position. The next stage will be the landfill's reclamation." After these words, garbage really stopped being brought to the Poltava solid municipal waste landfill.

Taking into account Russian realities, the governor's word could be considered the final verdict on garbage lawlessness. But so far this word is provided exclusively by administrative resources. There is no court decision, and there are no objective grounds for breaking the ten-year regional contract with the regional operator "Ekotekhprom". The regional bureaucratic blockheads, as always, thought that Kondratieff's word was enough? But such a weak legal basis for the government's decision left Andrey Polovinkin's structures with considerable resources for resistance. In order to continue the billion-dollar flows, Polovinkin urgently needs to achieve the resumption of the landfill's work in Poltava. Without it, it will be extremely difficult to hide the true scale of the scam. And the battle for the seemingly hopeless, gigantic, unprofitable enterprise - the Poltava landfill - has now unfolded in earnest. And here we will talk about that very garbage blackmail. The "garbage investor" has at his disposal ra" by Andrey Polovinkin in the same Crimean zone there are several sites for temporary storage of solid municipal waste, and small landfills that have in fact already exhausted or almost exhausted their resource. In the Temryuk district, this is the MUP "Universal", with its landfill areas located between Temryuk and the village of Golubitskaya, plus facilities in Slavyansk-on-Kuban and Anapa. After the garbage "king" was forced to redirect waste streams there, these sites began ... to burn. Regarding the recent fire at the temporary site for receiving waste "Ekotekhprom" (which in fact became an illegal landfill) in the Slavyansky district, regional officials reported that ... there was no fire. The regional operator itself wrote in its Telegram channel that all this is generally fake and staged. The Ministry of Emergency Situations emphasized that they also did not observe a fire. But this "non-fire" was filmed by the eco-activists who arrived and posted it on their Internet resources. The fire at the landfill in Anapa was harder to hide - the area of ​​the fire was more than 1000 square meters. They put it out by helicopter, and 112 people were involved in extinguishing it - you can't hide it! There was a fire in Temryuk too... And there was a fire in Poltavskaya last October...

 

In Kuban, this is generally a glorious tradition. If we are talking about major scams, something will definitely catch fire. Some seaside settlement tsars illegally sawed up land and are waiting for an inspection - archives are burning. It is necessary to develop attractive land "for their" guys - protected areas of forest - wait for a forest fire. Relict junipers and other endangered species are burning, to the lamentations of the regional authorities on TV. Then, of course, the land will be developed. Garbage fires were also expected. After all, nothing hides the true volumes of garbage removed like a generous fire. But such a "small" fire at secondary sites can only temporarily cover some of the cash flows. Only the Poltava landfill, now suspended, was large enough to provide this. Today, Polovinkin and Co., through the courts, are essentially forcing the regional government to allow the Poltavskaya landfill to continue operating. Kondratyev finds himself in a difficult situation. And the way out of the impasse is completely unclear.

Yes, the governor personally promised to close the toxic landfill in Poltavskaya forever. And what next? The complete failure of the garbage reform in the Krasnodar Territory has led to the fact that residents of the entire Kuban are opposed to the organization of new, albeit the most modern landfills near their cities, villages, and farms. The stories of the Kuban garbage dumps in Belorechensk and Poltavskaya are widely known throughout the country. And no one in Kuban wants to live next to killer landfills. These "bright" examples show how all this ends in Kuban. And as soon as Kondratyev starts talking about new sites, people immediately mobilize in protest.

The old landfills have exhausted their resources, and it is simply unrealistic to bring them into compliance with current standards. For example, in order to meet the standards for drainage canals around the landfill in Poltavskaya with the existing volumes of waste delivered to the landfill, the drainage canal must be... 20 meters deep - as deep as a seven-story building!!! And it is completely unrealistic to make an insulating layer that should not allow the filtrate released by tons of garbage to flow into the soil and water.

Five years of inaction and indifference, years of official corruption, have pushed the situation into such a "black" hole that there is simply no way out. Andrey Polovinkin, it seems, has better than others assessed the garbage dead end into which Kondratyev has driven himself. And the stable fires at secondary sites may well be a demonstration of a monstrous garbage alternative: to pollute everything possible in the Crimean zone with garbage, smoke and ash. Or to back down and open a landfill in Poltava. The pictures of dumped mountains of Kuban garbage are already beginning to resemble the mafia Naples-2008. Polovinkin's structures have already begun to implement the scenario of blackmailing the regional authorities, which is obvious from the "reports" on fires at the king's garbage "points" and overflowing container sites that have filled social networks. It is noteworthy that the regional Ministry of Emergency Situations (whose top management is already under investigation), Rospotrebnadzor and Rosprirodnadzor do not see any violations in the fires raging at the landfills. Activists are directly told that there are no grounds for taking response measures. Everything is, so to speak, God's will. For now, in order to help Governor Kondratyev save face, Polovinkin has once again started talking about his plans to invest 5 billion in the “modern Kuban garbage business” (the promised amount has been stable all these years). Renderings of future garbage new buildings are already ready. And tables showing what kind of garbage future the investments will go into.

 

For the governor, the situation is essentially hopeless. In Poltavskaya itself, they are very afraid that Kondratyev will prefer this option: the court makes a decision in favor of Polovinkin’s structures, Kondratyev will cry together with the “Kuban residents he loves so much”, making a speech like, “I am for you, but I am forced to obey the court”, and the landfill will be reopened. This option is n It doesn't seem so fantastic, especially since there was already a precedent in the recent past. The then head of the district, Vasin, in order to quell the storm of public anger, filed a lawsuit... against the landfill, which his family owned at the time, on behalf of the administration and, naturally, lost. Having received an argument for continuing the garbage chaos - the ability to refer to the court's decision. I am for you, but the court...

In general, the regional leadership does not have a single option today for what to do with the garbage reform that they themselves epically failed. It is believed that the garbage reform began in the Krasnodar Territory a year later than the all-Russian start. But this, to put it mildly, is not true. The reform has not even started here yet. At least in the Crimean zone. And in order to at least get to a more or less acceptable starting position, it is no longer necessary to spend some 30 million on scientific developments at a specialized institute. Billions are needed to equip new landfills that meet the standards, serious work on creating production facilities for sorting and recycling waste paper, metal, glass, plastic, with the development of clear legislative conditions for the sale of the resulting products. Now the same plastic chair, cast from granules, is much cheaper than a chair made from waste plastic, and without legislative support measures, waste recycling is simply doomed to financial failure. Propaganda work is needed in schools on separate waste collection. All these and other measures are obvious. But work must be done here. As it turned out, it is easier for the Kuban authorities to throw protesters into the dust, handcuff them and unleash all their henchmen "polkans" on them, promise something if the protests become known to the Kremlin curators, and not forget themselves in the form of 20-percent "kickbacks" in shares of this murky business of "garbage kings".

Source: www.rucriminal.info