A court in Kazan delivered a verdict in the high-profile case involving the theft of funds during the reconstruction of workshops at the Kazan Aviation Plant (KAZ) named after Gorbunov. The enterprise is modernizing and assembling Tu-160M strategic bombers, the "White Swan".
The Vakhitovsky District Court found Evgeny Polovkin, deputy director of the contractor firm OOO "Stroitelnaya kompaniya," guilty of fraud. He was given a three-year suspended prison sentence, according to the publication "Realnoe vremya".
The investigation claimed that 148.3 million rubles were stolen during the reconstruction of the enterprise's production workshops. However, during the proceedings, the court revised the damage calculations and reduced them by almost 100 times — to 1.48 million rubles.
The work was carried out as part of the federal program for the development of the defense-industrial complex. The contract for modernizing the aircraft plant's production capacities was concluded in 2016 between PAO "Tupolev" and the general contractor — AO "Kazansky GiproNIIaviaprom." The total project cost was about 1.8 billion rubles.
According to the prosecution, the subcontractor received an advance of more than 510 million rubles and used part of the funds for purposes other than intended. The investigation suggested that some of the money could have gone to outside projects.
During the examinations, it became clear that a significant portion of the construction work at the site had in fact been completed. Some reconstruction sections were finished to 50–90%, and certain ones even exceeded the original scope.
The court found proven only a minor episode of damages and partially satisfied the civil claim.
At the beginning of March, it became known that PAO "Tupolev" had announced an auction for the construction of a new radio engineering measurements building in Kazan. Investment in the project will amount to 1.6 billion rubles.