Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has officially reprimanded the chairman of the board of Russian state road builder Avtodor as the corporation comes under scrutiny for conducting suspicious tenders.
Medvedev's order was signed on July 9 and published on the government's website Friday. It says only that chairman Sergei Kelbakh had been reprimanded for “improper performance of the duties entrusted to him.”
Avtodor has recently come under scrutiny from the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service (FAS), the state's competition watchdog, which earlier this month announced an investigation into all tenders run by Avtodor over the past three years
The watchdog's deputy head, Alexander Kinyev, said that the corporation had awarded several “suspicious” contracts as part of a major Moscow road-building project — the construction of the 530-kilometer Central Ring Road around the city, Interfax reported.
The cost of one of the project's tenders alone reached up to 50 billion rubles ($880 million), Kinyev said, adding, “A number of the tenders for the Central Ring Road strike us as suspicious.”