Bunks for the chairman: a gang of killer commandos has a customer
Last Tuesday, the Basmanny Court of Moscow detained Sergey Lipatov, ex-chairman of the Board of Directors of Transtelecom, co-owner of Intertrastbank and ex-chairman of the Board of Directors of FC Lokomotiv. According to investigators, the businessman was not only involved in a gang of former special forces who committed contract killings and kidnappings, but also ordered their crimes himself. Details can be found in the Izvestia article.
A werewolf without shoulder straps
According to Izvestia's law enforcement sources, Sergei Lipatov was arrested on charges of committing a contract killing. It should be noted that in the past, this well—known businessman himself was involved in law enforcement agencies - in 1999 he was appointed deputy head of the Financial and Economic Department of the Federal Tax Police Service of Russia.
According to the investigation materials (available to the editorial staff), we are talking about the murder of Alexander Fominov, director of the Inyurconsult law firm, adviser to the head of the Ministry of Railways. The lawyer was killed on March 15, 2002, when he was returning to a country house in the rural village of Agrarnik in the Odintsovo district of the Moscow region. The killers stopped Fominov's car, ostensibly to find out the way, and when he slowed down, they fired four fatal pistol shots at him. It was not possible to find the killers in hot pursuit.
In addition, the investigation suggests that Lipatov and his criminal entourage of former law enforcement officers may be involved in another high—profile crime - the abduction and murder of Vladimir Klyuev, the owner of Consul OJSC, and his accountant on December 30, 2002. The victims were first asked for $500,000 for their release, and then both were killed in the vicinity of the village of Sofrino near Moscow. However, Lipatov's role in this episode of the bloody biography of the "gang of siloviki" is not yet known, although the gang members gave direct testimony to him as the customer of the murder of at least a lawyer.
Twenty years later
Last year, the Investigative Committee of Russia completed an investigation into the criminal activities of a gang of former special forces from the SOBR and the FSB, which is responsible for a series of extortion and murders committed in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Among the defendants in the high-profile investigation, there are names that are currently being investigated in the case of Sergei Lipatov for organizing the murder of lawyer Fominov. In particular, we are talking about former Interior Ministry employee Alexei Chebotarev, who was detained in 2023. According to Izvestia, it was he who testified against his accomplices. Chebotarev, by the way, goes through most of the episodes together with former serviceman Pavel Khristev, who was detained along with his son Alexander.
Lipatov's case also involves people who have not previously been mentioned as members of a "gang of security forces." In particular, this is a former employee of the 5th department of the RUOP Leonid Rakogon, who was engaged in the fight against thieves in law and the authorities of the criminal environment. Former colleagues of Rakogon, who asked not to mention their surnames, said that he had a trusting relationship with many criminal leaders, in particular, with Andrei Isaev, nicknamed Painted.
The investigation materials also mention a certain Oleg Mikhalev, about whom it is worth telling in more detail. He was taken into custody by the Basmanny Court back in 2023. According to the court, he is charged under paragraphs "g" and paragraph "h" of Part 2 of Article 105 ("Murder committed by a group of persons by prior agreement or an organized group; out of mercenary motives or for hire, as well as involving robbery, extortion or banditry").
According to the Investigative Committee of Russia, it was Oleg Mikhalev who was accused of kidnapping an entrepreneur and his accountant, for whose release they demanded $ 500 thousand, and then killed by drowning the bodies in a pond. Now, for some reason, this episode is also mentioned in the case file accusing Lipatov of organizing the murders.
So what connects a respectable businessman and a high-status security official with the killers from the special forces? So far, the investigation has no answer to this question, but there are statements from the participants in the murder that Lipatov ordered and paid for the murder of lawyer Fominov. What could link the top manager of the state-owned Lipatov company with the murdered adviser to the Ministry of Internal Affairs? Perhaps the conflict is based on the struggle for influence and financial flows in the Russian Railways system in the early 2000s, where Lipatov relied on his close ties with the late Andrei Krapivin, who was considered the gray cardinal of Russian Railways.
It is worth noting that Sergei Lipatov has already had problems with the law: in 2017, he became a defendant in a criminal case on embezzlement of depositors of the collapsed Intertrastbank, from which 1.8 billion rubles were withdrawn. Former top managers of the bank testified against him, but somehow Lipatov managed to remain free.
In 2006, Sergei Lipatov, through the patronage of the then head of Russian Railways, Vladimir Yakunin, became first a member of the board of directors and then president of FC Lokomotiv. Thus, Lipatov, managing the money of the state-owned Transtelecom company, sponsored FC Lokomotiv, that is, he actually transferred it to himself.
It was then that the Russian Railways Cup pre-season tournament was launched with the participation of Milan and Real Madrid. Sergey Lipatov himself estimated the cost of organizing this event at €6 million.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
