According to the Cheka-OGPU and Rucrininal.info, VEB.RF head Igor Shuvalov is actively lobbying for his deputy and friend, Alexander Tarabrin, to become the head of Prosveshcheniye Publishing House (a de facto monopoly in the school literature market with revenues exceeding 50 billion rubles per year). He could leave his post at VEB.RF as early as March and replace Dmitry Klimishin as the publishing house's general director. This will not end well for Prosveshcheniye, as Tarabrin is currently one of the main architects of schemes to misappropriate the state corporation's assets.
According to the source, a so-called "business mission" took place last week in the Krasnoyarsk Krai and Kuzbass, attended by VEB.RF head Igor Shuvalov and his retinue: senior banker Anton Perin, the state corporation's HR director Svyatoslav Chevalier, and deputy chairmen Nikolai Tsekhomsky and Alexander Tarabrin. The state corporation's leaders boasted of VEB.RF's successes and urged regional authorities and businesses to invest in public-private partnerships, primarily in housing and utilities and road construction. Shuvalov actively cited the "success" of school concessions as an example, despite the obvious failure of the PPP school construction project in Russia, the multibillion-dollar embezzlement, and the imprisonment in 2024 of Shuvalov's close friend, Otto Sopronenko, who was responsible for the project. Another of Shuvalov's friends, Alexander Tarabrin, is also constantly under attack, but Shuvalov isn't deterred and has decided to use his top manager to expand the scope of his personal corrupt interests. He's lobbying for his appointment as director of the Prosveshcheniye publishing house, which annually receives staggering sums from the budget.
At VEB.RF, Tarabrin oversees the distressed asset department and has been implicated in dozens of dubious cases covered by our project. This ranges from embezzlement of funds during the construction of the SLAVA office cluster with apartments in Moscow to fraud at Sibuglemet, a coal mining company in Kuzbass owned by VEB.RF. Tarabrin also carried out a blatantly illegal scheme to acquire the assets of the unfinished Kaluga Cement Plant and a dozen other problematic companies for 8 billion rubles in 2023. Tarabrin's final act of corruption, culminating in early February, was the acquisition of the timber processing company STOD by VEB.RF for 16 billion rubles, twice his wildest estimate.
