Soft landing: the case of a former official of the Federal Air Transport Agency is connected with the embezzlement of 800 million rubles

On July 3, the Khoroshevsky Court arrested Alexander Neradko, the former head of the Federal Air Transport Agency, in a particularly large-scale fraud case. An editorial source reports that the investigation is linked to the embezzlement of about 800 million rubles during the construction of the Domodedovo Airport runway. Neradko faces up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to 1 million rubles. However, this is not the only episode that may be of interest to the TFR. Who was detained in the Federal Air Transport Agency over the past couple of years from Alexander Neradko's entourage is in the Izvestia article.

What is Neradko accused of?

Alexander Neradko's arrest card appeared on the district court's website a few minutes before the meeting, so the journalists did not have time to enter the building, and the trial actually took place behind closed doors. As a result, the district court arrested the defendant for two months. He pleads not guilty. Neradko has already been charged with fraud on a particularly large scale. The defense intends to appeal the court's decision.

Alexander Neradko has been the head of the Federal Air Transport Agency since 2009 and was relieved of his post in September 2023 by order of Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin. His dismissal occurred after searches at the agency's central office on Leningradsky Prospekt. Shortly before that, in May 2022, Neradko received a reprimand from the government for "improper performance of his official duties."

The case against the head of the Federal Air Transport Agency is being investigated by the Western Interregional Investigative Department for Transport of the TFR, and its operational support is provided by employees of the FSB Economic Security Service. The materials collected by the security forces, according to Izvestia sources, are at the heart of the case.

The TFR does not disclose the details of the investigation, however, according to sources of the publication, the case is related to the theft of about 800 million rubles during the construction of a new runway (RUNWAY-2) at Domodedovo Airport.

Long-term runway construction

Work on RUNWAY-2 in Domodedovo began in 2014, with funding coming from the federal budget. The state contract worth 12.85 billion rubles was awarded to the SU-1 company. The completion of the project was planned for 2016. However, by this time, the contractor had started having serious financial problems, and bankruptcy proceedings were initiated against him. The pace of work on the strip has decreased, and the facility has become more than a year behind schedule. Despite this, the Federal Air Transport Agency did not terminate the contract with SU-1 for almost two years and did so only at the end of 2018, when the construction had actually been standing for several months.

The failure to meet deadlines has led to the need for additional budget funding. In 2019, the government allocated another 620 million rubles from the reserve fund to complete the construction of the runway, aircraft parking areas and sewage treatment plants. But even this did not help, and later the Federal Air Transport Agency requested an additional 11.4 billion rubles from the Ministry of Finance to complete the reconstruction of the Domodedovo airfield infrastructure. But even ten years after the start of construction, the new strip has not been put into operation.

At the beginning of 2025, the Prosecutor General's Office, seeking to convert Domodedovo Airport into state revenue, for the first time disclosed the circumstances of this long-term construction. In the materials of the lawsuit, the supervisory authority indicated that the facility worth 12.85 billion rubles is about 80% ready and has not yet been put into operation. In addition, the Prosecutor General's Office noted that the contract with SU-1 was terminated only after a long period of downtime, and the actions of the former owners of the airport prevented the completion of the reconstruction of the airfield infrastructure. Moreover, in February of this year, the new owner of Domodedovo announced that the strip was built in violation of building regulations and may require reconstruction.

What threatens the official

If the initial conclusions of the investigation are confirmed during the investigation and trial, then this is most likely not a one-time episode, but a pattern of abuse typical of large state-owned enterprises, said Alexey Gavrishev, lawyer and managing partner of AVG Legal.

"As a rule, such crimes are based not on the direct withdrawal of budget funds, but on a combination of actions: overstating the cost of work and materials, paying for virtually unfulfilled volumes, using affiliated contractors and subcontractors, signing unreliable acceptance certificates, as well as artificially delaying construction, which then requires additional budget financing," he said.

Lawyer Ekaterina Kutuzova noted that the investigation will have to prove that the delay in terminating the contract with the bankrupt contractor SU-1 and the subsequent allocation of an additional 620 million rubles from the reserve fund were not due to management errors or miscalculations in monitoring, namely deliberate actions aimed at embezzlement of funds.

"The mere fact of missing deadlines and exceeding estimates is not an absolute proof of guilt — an expert examination is needed to confirm that at the time of decision—making Neradko and Makhov knew about the financial insolvency of the contractor and acted contrary to the interests of the state," she stressed. — The court will also have to assess the actions of the new owner of the airport, who reported violations of building regulations. If the defects are the result of design decisions or poor quality of materials supplied by the contractor himself, this may indicate the contractor's dishonesty, and not the direct intent of the official of the Federal Air Transport Agency.

A particular difficulty in investigating such cases is that decisions are made over several years with the participation of a large number of officials, contractors, designers and regulatory authorities, Alexey Gavrishev explained.

"The article on fraud on a particularly large scale provides for a penalty of up to ten years in prison with a fine of 1 million rubles," he added.

However, the final qualifications, according to experts, may change during the investigation, since in such cases, official offenses, abuse of authority or receiving a bribe are often also considered.

A series of cases of the Federal Air Transport Agency

Prior to the arrest of the head, Rosaviation employees repeatedly became involved in criminal cases — the most high-profile episode was related to the illegal withdrawal of 59 civil aircraft from Russian jurisdiction. According to the Ministry of Transport and the FSB, from March 2022 to June 2023, employees of the Federal Air Transport Agency, contrary to presidential decrees, carried out the deregistration of aircraft without a complete set of documents and provided false information about their location.

Some of the equipment, including Il—76 aircraft and Mi-8 helicopters, subsequently ended up in unfriendly countries and was used to support Ukraine.

Criminal cases of negligence and abuse of office were initiated on this fact in February 2024. As part of the investigation, the offices of Acting Head of the Flight Safety Inspectorate Kristina Byvalina and Deputy Head of the State Aircraft Registration Department Peter Kozyrev were searched.

Earlier, in February 2023, Alexander Neradko's "protege", Alexander Matyushkin, deputy head of the Digital Transformation and Security Department, was arrested. He was accused of receiving 4.45 million rubles in kickbacks for signing government contracts. At the same time, embezzlement of budget funds allocated to protect the IT infrastructure of the Federal Air Transport Agency from cyber attacks was revealed: the main person involved was InfAvia, whose co-owner, according to the investigation, had a long-standing relationship with the former management of the agency.

In addition, in the summer of 2023, Neradko's adviser Elena Mikheeva was detained in a fraud case, which he allegedly tried to get to the post of deputy head of the department, bypassing the Ministry of Transport. The investigation found that for years she was listed as a "dead soul" in the subordinate State ATM Corporation. In the same year, employees of the flight Operations Directorate were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment for participating in an organized criminal community that extorted money from pilots for issuing and maintaining flight certificates.

Later, in March 2025, Neradko's former deputy, Sergei Tymoshenko, was detained for bribery. At the same time, the Dorogomilovsky court sentenced Maxim Pavlyuk, the former head of the department of the Qualification Commission of the Federal Air Transport Agency, to eight years in a high-security penal colony for a similar episode.