The only remaining defendant in a major fraud case involving the Voronezh region’s Housing and Utilities Ministry has vanished after being sent to fight in Ukraine, the news outlet Abireg reported, citing sources in the local security services.
The man, former engineer Yevgeny Tyutyunchenko, had been charged with large-scale fraud.
Initially, prosecutors also accused two deputy regional housing ministers, Yelena Evsyukova and Natalia Tolcheyeva.
Their charges were later downgraded to abuse of office, a lighter offense under Russian law, and Tyutyunchenko remained the sole defendant on the more severe fraud charge.
In mid-May, Tyutyunchenko was transferred from pre-trial detention to a military training unit and sent to the front, and investigators suspended his case.
He subsequently disappeared, and his current whereabouts are unknown.
According to investigators, in February 2022 Evsyukova and Tolcheyeva signed a 9.3-million-ruble ($104,000) contract with a Crimean company, Alfa LLC, to study solid waste accumulation rates in the Voronezh region.
That autumn, the officials accepted the work without the required expert review.
Prosecutors say the results of the study, which Tyutyuchenko carried out himself, were falsified, with waste generation rates deliberately understated.
The lowered waste accumulation norms led to artificially low garbage collection tariffs, leaving regional waste operators unable to cover costs and prompting lawsuits.
A BBC Russian investigation has found that at least 102 Russian officials, lawmakers and security officers facing corruption or other serious criminal charges have gone to the front since the start of the full-scale war, often as a way to avoid prison.
The list includes 22 mayors, 10 regional lawmakers, seven deputy governors or ministers, 25 law enforcement officers and two judges.
By February 2025, at least 23 had returned home with their criminal cases dropped, and another 17 were killed or went missing.
Officials who escaped punishment in this way include Konstantin Polezhaev, a former Belgorod deputy governor sentenced to five years in a maximum-security prison for taking 17 million rubles in bribes; Oleg Kinev, a former Yekaterinburg city councilman convicted in 2016 of arranging the murder of an elderly woman to seize her apartment; and Oleg Gumenyuk, the former Vladivostok mayor sentenced to 16.5 years in prison and fined 150 million rubles for bribery.
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