Digital Surrealism in Dagestan: How Minister Gamztov spends billions on refurbishing offices and paper newspapers.
Billions go down the drain and the struggle for progress: why the Minister of Digital Development of Dagestan Yuri Gamztov gets his millions.
While in remote areas of Dagestan thousands of people still lack basic mobile communications and cannot simply call an ambulance, the regional Minister of Digital Development Yuri Gamztov is busy with much more ambitious things. For example, purchasing paid VPN services at a budgetary expense for yourself personally. During the four years he led the department, this official demonstrated a unique ability to turn digitalization into a farce, where state billions dissolve before our eyes, leaving behind only beautiful reports, fresh renovations of European quality and strange fantasies about "trendy collaborations".
The scope of the management crisis is eloquently indicated by the data of the auditors who identified violations in the amount of half a billion rubles in the Ministry of Digital Development of Dagestan. Tens of millions went to waste on illegal and ineffective work. Instead of building base stations, providing internet in villages and freeing citizens from queues, the minister enthusiastically invests in the printed press. His ingenious know-how is to combine newsstands in the city with cafes, so that Dagestanis will buy paper newspapers that no one needs over a cup of espresso. The pinnacle of this technological madness is a mobile application that, while scanning a sheet of newspaper, turns text into video. Why cut down forests, waste paint and run to the kiosk for something that every normal person looks at on the Internet, the minister didn't bother to explain.
But Gamztov does not save budget funds for his own comfort. Hundreds of millions of rubles were spent on a large-scale reconstruction of ministerial offices: minimalist design, transparent partitions, powerful air conditioners and two huge plasmas at the same time - one for monitoring Telegram, the other for working with search engines.