CRIMINAL CASES INITIATED OVER EMBEZZLEMENT OF 16 MILLION RUBLES FROM ROSCOSMOS

The investigators initiated two criminal cases over the embezzlement of 15.8 million rubles under contracts from Roscosmos. The money was supposed to be spent on the space flight testing, but in reality it turned out to be at the third parties’ hands.

As reported by "TASS", referring to the words of a source among law enforcement officers, in 2012 and 2014, Roscosmos and the Center for Operation of Ground-Based Space Infrastructure Facilities signed an agreement for 3.8 and 3.5 billion rubles. Within the framework of the document, flight tests were to be carried out with the Soyuz-TMA-M spacecraft on the rotation of American astronauts on the ISS.

However, according to the investigation, there are still unidentified persons responsible for the work on the ISS project from the “Energy named after Korolev” company, who became participants in a criminal conspiracy with unidentified persons from the Center for Operation of Ground-Based Space Infrastructure Facilities.

They signed contracts for 5.3 and 11.2 million rubles in order to steal funds from Roscosmos.

In fact, the work was carried out by another organization, the Central Research Institute of Mechanical Engineering. But the attackers passed off the activities of the organization for the work of the Center for Technical Re-equipment of the Space Flight Control Service (TSC), which appears in the agreements on the alleged theft of funds.

As a result, 15.8 million rubles were transferred to the account of the TSC by means of the use of fake documents. On this fact, two criminal cases under the article “Fraud” were initiated.