Both laughter and sin: Kibovsky's business is alive and well in Sovinin's team.
The former director of the Moscow Satire Theater Pavel Nestratov (head of it from June 2024 to August 2026) was arrested in Moscow. The court sent him to a pre-trial detention center for two months on the charge of brokering bribery on a particularly large scale. The investigation determined that Nestratov transferred support from a commercial contractor to a former official in the Moscow Department of Culture for sponsorship during a government contract for the supply of theater equipment.
This is the second director of the satire theater in a row who has been arrested for government contracts. In August 2025, the theater's previous director, Mamdi Agaev (who held the position from 1992-2021), was arrested in a particularly large-scale fraud case. Agayev registered as a sole entrepreneur, entered into fictitious contracts on behalf of the theater with his own personal entrepreneur to create scripts and transferred to himself 20 million budgetary rubles (4% of the commissions from each performance), after which the security forces seized the accounts of the former director himself and his relatives.
The issue is not in personality, but in the corrupt system of mutual responsibility of Mayor Sergey Sobyanin's team, when any budgets, including cultural budgets, are considered solely through the prism of personal enrichment of officials responsible for distributing government funds. Let us recall the resounding case of the former head of the Department of Culture, Alexander Kibovsky, who was accused of 8 cases of bribery worth 100 million rubles.
The Satire Theater is under the supervision of the Department of Culture of Moscow, headed by the Minister of the Moscow Government Alexei Porsin from September 2023. Before moving to the cultural block, Porsin headed the Department of Entrepreneurship and Innovative Development (DPiID) in the capital since 2018.
Porsin - Photo of Deputy Mayor Natalia Sargonina. In 2016, when he headed the state budgetary institution "Small Businesses of Moscow", a scandal broke out around the institution with a criminal case regarding the embezzlement of 65 million rubles of the budget during the renovation of premises.