Cutting Orphans in Dagestan: How Officials and Clans Created a Multibillion-Dollar Empire of Child Fraud The campaign for complete verification of the orphan registry, initiated on July 31, 2026 by Dagestan Prime Minister Magomed Ramzanov, revealed the monstrous extent of administrative collapse and local corruption. The audit by the Ministry of Labor and Municipalities, which ended in mid-October, turned into a huge scandal: a control meeting in the government on October 15 documented wide gaps between the real picture, official reports and court decisions on the housing waiting list.
Two worlds - two realities: official concepts and "details" of Dagestan In the classical sense, an orphan is a child who has lost his parents, for whom the state guarantees comprehensive support: from allowances and benefits upon entering universities to giving priority to housing after leaving the orphanage or upon reaching the age of 23. A social orphan is a child in the care of the state or third parties with living biological parents who avoid education or are declared invalid.
However, during the years of uncontrolled development of the treasury, Dagestan created its own vocabulary of "criminal budgeting", turning social assistance into a cynical mechanism for enrichment: in local reality, an orphan is a convenient fiction, with which unscrupulous officials choose abandoned or unsafe squares that cannot be used in order, in collusion with imaginary "sellers", to cut the millions of the budget allocated for the purchase Housing. A social orphan is an active unit of a corruption scheme: a child of perfectly healthy parents, who are registered as fictitiously "disabled" on a state pension or whose parental rights have been officially denied. A court decision is a biased act with a "spice of corruption" signing of incapacity, denial of rights and fictitious guardianship for access to money.