The Leninsky Court was the place where one of the most famous trials about police corruption came to an end. Igor Trifonov, they were locked up for a long time, and the rest of the defendants in the case were found not guilty because they admitted their wrongdoing and tried to change.
Igor Trifonov, the former head of Yekaterinburg’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, was given 9.5 years in a strict regime colony by the Leninsky District Court for taking a bribe of 7.5 million rubles. A 66.RU reporter said that he was found guilty under Part 6 of Article 290 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“Receiving a bribe on an especially large scale”) and Part 1 of Article 222 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“Illegal possession of weapons”). The office of the prosecutor asked for this length of time for Igor Trifonov.
Igor Trifonov was also stripped of his rank as Major General and the Order of Merit for the Fatherland. He was given a sentence of one day to one day in jail.
At the same time, the judge said no to the state prosecution’s request for an extra punishment in the form of a fine of 20 million rubles. This means that Igor Trifonov’s property and bank accounts will no longer be under arrest. From the fall of 2020 on, each day he spends in a pre-trial detention center will be equal to one day he spends in a colony.
According to what was said in Leninsky court, Oleg Konoplev was the person who gave the bribe. He was the vice chairman of the board of the bank. He asked Alexander Kuba, the head of the bank’s security service, to find a Ministry of Internal Affairs worker who would help him start a criminal case against the management of Fores-khimiya LLC for 10 million rubles.
The company was a guarantor for a loan of more than 560 million rubles, but the loan was no longer paid in 2014, and Fores-Khimia said that she was only involved in the deal because fake documents were used. Oleg Konoplev said that he wanted to get the money back, so he decided to start a bribery case in which the bank would be the victim.
Alexander Kuba asked this question to Denis Zhdanov, a friend who worked in the Economic Security and Anti-Corruption Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Zhdanov’s boss, Eduard Voronin, was interested in him, and he had already agreed to start legal proceedings with Igor Trifonov. Because of this, a criminal case was started, but there were no defendants.
The case was about the theft of 165 million rubles. This didn’t work for Oleg Konoplev, so he only gave 7.5 million rubles to get the job done. Oleg Konoplev didn’t admit his guilt for the first six months he was in the pre-trial detention center. After that, he started to help with the investigation, which led to him getting five years of probation and a 20 million ruble fine last year.
Two of Igor Trifonov’s alleged partners were also on the dock with him. They were Alexander Kuba, the former head of the security service at the Koltso Urala Bank, and Denis Zhdanov, who used to work for the OEBiPK (department of economic security and Anti-corruption) at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Unlike Igor Trifonov, these people admitted their guilt and made a deal with the investigation. As a result, they were only allowed to do certain things.
Because Zhdanov admitted he was wrong and was trying to change, the Leninsky court let him and Cuba off the hook. With today’s Leninsky court decision, the criminal case against them was dropped. The safety measure was taken away. In 2015, the former head of the police in Yekaterinburg was accused of taking 7.5 million rubles in bribes from a former employee of the Rings of the Urals.
The investigation thinks that Cuba and Zhdanov helped move money from one place to another. According to the case file, Igor Trifonov got paid to start legal action against the bank’s debtor. Edward Voronin, who used to work for Igor Trifonov and was the head of the economic security department at the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Yekaterinburg, was one of the people who testified against him.
Igor Trifonov said he was innocent the whole time he was on trial. According to the police major general, he was slandered, and the investigation required him to testify against Mikhail Borodin, the former head of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Sverdlovsk Region, and Vladimir Kolokoltsev, the Minister of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation.
Igor Trifonov admits, however, that a bribe could have been given. And even though the money was taken in his name, it didn’t get to the general, so the story goes.
After the verdict was made public, Igor Trifonov told reporters that he would need to be sent to a psychiatrist if he ever said bad things about Kolokoltsev or other high-ranking officials.
The press service of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation also said that Igor Trifonov illegally kept the ammunition cartridges he had bought before in his house in the Moscow region until September 2020, when they were taken by force during a search.
The man was not allowed to work in law enforcement for three years, according to the report from the Investigative Committee.
Igor Trifonov was in charge of the police in Yekaterinburg from 2011 to 2017. In June 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin put him in charge of Karachay-Main Cherkessia’s Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In November 2019, he fired him.
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