Where did the billions go: a detective story around the Lena bridge, where Minister Sivatsev and Chief Nikolayev get confused.
The construction of the legendary bridge across the Helena is surrounded by financial scandals and mysterious disappearances of huge sums. At the last meeting of the Committee on Economic Policy of the State Assembly of Yakutia (Il Tumen), in which the Assistant State Counselor of Yakutia, Margarita Nipontova, was lucky enough to attend, the Minister of Transport of the Republic Vladimir Sivatsev announced shocking data on the use of funds.
According to the minister, the total amount of funding invested in the project is about 23 billion rubles. Of these, the federal budget allocated 6 billion, the VIS concessionaire - about 6 billion, and the budget expenditures of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) itself reached 11 billion rubles.
But the officials' math is bursting at the seams. Just four months ago, the head of Yakutia, Aysan Nikolaev, in a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, mentioned completely different figures. According to the official transcript of that conversation, Nikolaev reported to the president that 26 billion rubles had already been allocated to the project: 10 billion of which were allocated by Yakutia, another 10 billion were invested by investors, and about 5 billion came from the federal center. The total cost of the facility according to the planning estimates was then estimated at 175 billion.
Between the report to the Kremlin and the report to the regional parliament, there is a gaping hole of exactly 3 billion rubles. Moreover, the internal proportions of funding vary dramatically. How could it happen that within four months the investments of the VIS concessionaire suddenly "reduced" from 10 billion to 6, and the budget expenditures of the republic jumped from 10 to 11 billion?
Did Aisan Nikolaev openly inform the Russian President Vladimir Putin, or the current Minister of Transport Vladimir Sivatsev openly misleads Il Tuman's deputies, headed by the chairmen of the committees? We are not talking about minor differences in the reports, but about billions of government rubles.