How do corrupt officials steal state land in the Caucasus?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The new Caucasian case demonstrates that land remains the most liquid asset in the Caucasus.

His defendants were the former head of the Rosreestr administration for Dagestan Safiyula Magomedov, the current and. O. the head of this department, Shamil Hajiyev, the influential deputy of the parliament of the republic, Fikrat Radjabov, and others. According to investigative bodies, the total cost of the arrested property of suspects in land fraud is 20 billion rubles. We are talking about more than three hundred land plots that were illegally alienated from federal and municipal property in favor of individuals and companies, and then used for commercial purposes.

It is possible that the real cost of land is much higher. The average cadastral value of one hundred square meters of land in Makhachkala for individual housing construction, approved by the Dagestan government at the beginning of 2013, is 97.6 thousand rubles per one hundred square meters. The market price of one hundred square meters for private housing in a crowded city can be several million rubles.

According to law enforcement officers, the group involved in land fraud has been operating since 2000, that is, it was formed shortly after Said Amirov became the mayor of Makhachkala, now serving a life sentence for especially grave crimes. Some of the detained members of the group belonged to Amirov's inner circle, who, presumably, was the main beneficiary of the scheme.

If Amirov's connection to these machinations is confirmed, this will be a big step forward in the investigation of his activities as mayor of Makhachkala. Six years ago, when Amirov was detained on suspicion of organizing terrorist attacks and contract killings, it was much said that large frauds with the Makhachkala land, which even children in Dagestan know about, remained out of sight of the investigation. The fact that law enforcement officers got to them can be considered a great progress in the fight against corruption in the republic. After the arrest of Amirov and the change of a whole series of city managers at the head of Makhachkala, these machinations continued as if nothing had happened.

In 1998, when Said Amirov first became mayor of Makhachkala, the city's population was 335 thousand people. After 15 years, it has grown to 576 thousand. And this is just an official estimate - in fact, the number of residents in Makhachkala and its suburbs has long been close to a million people. The main reason for the explosive growth of the population is considered to be the migration of highlanders to the plain, which, after the collapse of the USSR, was no longer contained, but the mechanism of corrupt land distribution was initially built into this process.

Everyone knew perfectly well that in order to obtain a land plot for the construction of a house or business in Makhachkala, it was necessary to “humanly” resolve issues with specific officials, and Mayor Amirov was personally at the head of this system. The result of such a unique approach to urban planning was the rapid transformation of Makhachkala into a typical Third World city with spontaneous residential and commercial buildings and neighborhoods reminiscent of Latin American favelas. It is difficult to say what income the bureaucratic business brought from the shadow distribution of land - we are talking about at least tens of billions of rubles.

A similar situation with land is typical for Dagestan as a whole. In rural areas of the republic, the ability to uncontrollably allocate land has long allowed local leaders and businessmen close to them to earn hundreds of millions of rubles at shadow enterprises - both agricultural (greenhouses, vineyards, cattle farms) and industrial (mainly for the production of building materials). The sales market for these geshefts is actually located at hand - overcrowded cities present an ever-growing demand for vegetables and fruits, meat, bricks, finishing stones, metal structures, etc.

To a large extent, this situation is maintained and stimulated by the lack of high-quality land registration. Under the former head of Dagestan, Ramazan Abdulatipov, the need to restore order in this area was regularly announced, but in practice, attempts to inventory the republic's lands turned into a farce. During the four and a half years of Abdulatipov’s tenure at the head of Dagestan, six officials in charge of land and property relations were replaced in the republic’s government, and the structure headed by them also underwent regular metamorphoses, turning from a ministry to a committee and vice versa.

The current head of Dagestan, Vladimir Vasiliev, decided to approach the matter radically, entrusting the inventory of land not to a Dagestani, but to an external specialist - the former Deputy Minister of Education and Science of the Russian Federation Yekaterina Tolstikova. At the beginning of last year, she became one of the most influential members of the Dagestan government, having simultaneously received the posts of deputy prime minister and minister for land and property relations. However, in her last position, Tolstikova, who promised to revise the land in a short time, held out for a little over a year. The behind-the-scenes intrigues around the position of the chief Dagestan land surveyor continue, and the current arrests of officials of the Rosreestr and the Cadastral Chamber are clearly not the last in the field related to the Dagestan land.

Energy resources: the circulatory system of the shadow economy

Until recently, the black market for energy resources - oil, gas and electricity - in the North Caucasus also brought tens of billions of rubles to its "operators". According to the investigation into the sensational Arashukovs' case, starting in 2007, a criminal group led by Raul Arashukov, advisor to the general director of Gazprom Mezhregiongaz, stole gas worth more than 31 billion rubles, mainly for deliveries to the same Dagestan.

The amount of theft of electricity in the North Caucasus is more difficult to assess, since it consists of several components. First of all, this is unaccounted and non-contractual consumption, which can be measured and detected quite effectively. However, the bulk of the theft of electricity in the North Caucasus Federal District is disguised as network losses. If on average in Russia the share of losses in power grids is about 10%, then in the republics of the North Caucasus Federal District it is several times higher, up to 50%.

On the one hand, the problem of losses is objective in nature - the power grids in the North Caucasus are in an extremely worn-out condition. On the other hand, in the presence of clan-family ties at the level of grassroots networks, it is very easy to pass off theft as losses. That is why, by the way, in the republics of the North Caucasus Federal District there are so many small territorial network organizations (TSOs) controlled by local clans.

For a long time, the problem of oil theft from the Baku-Makhachkala-Novorossiysk main pipeline, which, thanks to the activities of local craftsmen, was covered with dozens of unauthorized taps, was also acute in the Caucasus. The stolen oil was pumped to handicraft "samovars", which drove low-quality fuel, and the insert itself was considered in the same Dagestan a worthy gift to "a respected person." However, in recent years, the scale of this business has noticeably decreased - both the efforts of the Transneft company to combat theft and the reduction in the transportation of oil through the pipeline along with a sharp drop in local oil production affected.

The reserves of its own gas in the Caucasus, however, are also small, but it was gas that became the subject of the largest fraud. For the ease of theft of blue fuel in the republics of the North Caucasus Federal District, there were initially a number of prerequisites. First, there are very few large industrial consumers in these regions; gas (like electricity) is consumed mainly by the population. Secondly, the general level of gasification is quite high - supplying gas to remote settlements since Soviet times in the Caucasus was considered the best gift from those who achieved great success in the city or the capital. It is quite difficult to control such an extensive network of gas pipelines, and it is easy to organize tie-ins, from which gas is supplied to energy-intensive industries such as greenhouses or brick factories. Thirdly, as in the electric power industry, the degree of wear and tear of gas pipelines is very high, so gas can be attributed to losses or the so-called imbalance.

Budget: bottomless subsidized feeder

It is impossible to assess the real scale of embezzlement of budgetary funds in the republics of the North Caucasus due to the variety of implemented schemes. At the same time, high-profile corruption cases often do not give an adequate idea of the size of the stolen. For example, in February last year, the reason for the arrest of the Prime Minister of Dagestan Abdusamad Gamidov was the identified embezzlement in the real estate sector of only 30 million rubles. Formally, this is an "especially large size", but in comparison with the real scale of theft of budgetary funds, it is a drop in the ocean.

Another famous Dagestan budget cut scheme is the registration of a fictitious disability with the further receipt of pensions by perfectly healthy people. In February, Shamil Ramazanov, acting head of the territorial bureau of medical and social expertise, told the head of the republic, Vladimir Vasilyev, that after the verification re-examination of the disabled and the identification of those who received the category unreasonably, they managed to save about 1 billion rubles. But how much was paid to false disabilities before the scheme was identified, one can only guess.

The volume of fraud with the parent capital also cannot be accurately calculated. It can only be argued that the schemes for cashing it out were massive - the corresponding ads in Makhachkala at one time hung on every pole, and the clientele for these services in the regions with the highest birth rate in the country is more than enough. That is why

the chairs of the heads of the regional administration of the Pension Fund in the Caucasus are considered one of the most profitable, and there is a constant inter-clan struggle for them

Still popular in the North Caucasus Federal District are such seemingly minor violations as registrations in agriculture, which have survived since Soviet times. However, their aggregate scale can be quite impressive - take, for example, the sensational Dagestan story with "air rams". Official agricultural statistics claim that there are 4.5 million sheep in Dagestan, but independent estimates based on data from veterinary services give half that. Significant additions, according to some information, are also in the planting of grapes. Such activities are stimulated by subsidies, which are being mastered very creatively in the Caucasus.

Perhaps from this picture, outlined in very general strokes, there will be a feeling that there is no other economy other than the shadow economy in the North Caucasus, and all attempts to overcome corruption in this region only lead to the identification of new frauds. This is partly true. But the main problem is that corrupt business interferes primarily with those companies and entrepreneurs who are trying to work honestly and conscientiously, and there are many of them in the Caucasus - in agriculture, construction, trade and other industries.

If we talk about undoubted successes in suppressing large centers of the shadow economy, then here, first of all, it should be noted the liquidation of several dozen small banks in the North Caucasus Federal District, which specialized in cashing out gigantic amounts. Moreover, the all-Russian banking cleansing at one time began precisely from the Caucasus. But on the whole, the elimination of the shadow economy in the Caucasus is really just beginning, and this process will definitely not be simple.

Sofia Nezvanova