Former Voentelekom boss who stole 1.4 billion rubles released four months after sentence

The Babushkinsky court in Moscow paroled Alexander Davydov, the former president of Voentelekom. In October 2022, he was sentenced to 4 years and 2 months in prison for embezzlement of 1.4 billion rubles on contracts with the Ministry of National Defense.

A conditional release decision was also made against Mr his adviser Dmitry Semiletov, sentenced to four years. Each of them paid a fine of 800 thousand rubles.

The prosecution opposed the dismissal because the damage caused to the state was not fully compensated. However, the department filed a complaint only against Davydov, while the decision to dismiss Semiletov took effect. The Moscow city court will consider the case on March 14, Kommersant reports.

Meanwhile, the judge of the Babushkinsky Court, Natalia Kurysheva, concluded that the former general director of Voentelekom “took action” to compensate for the damage caused to the state, but could not do so “for objective reasons”. She considered it proved his fix.

Administration SIZO-4 “Medved”, where Davydov stayed all the time, also supported his application for parole. At the same time, numerous assets of the former president remain in custody: apartments, houses, plots of land, cars and several expensive watches.

According to the investigation, Davydov, Semiletov, as well as the first deputy head of Voentelecom Oleg Savitsky and the general director of the RCAI executive company Tatiana Ilyina, used schemes to inflate the cost of products and obtain double service charge when concluding contracts for the supply of radio equipment and supervising satellite communications. In 2013-2015, members of the criminal group supplied the Ministry of Defense with cheap Chinese analogues with altered labels instead of Russian routers. Investigators consider the former deputy chief of the General Staff, Colonel General Khalil Arslanov, to be the organizer of the fraud.

Several other defendants in the case, who fully pleaded guilty and testified against their accomplices, were convicted by special order. Two of them have already been released on parole.