The Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia has opened a criminal case for the theft of 400 million rubles (about BGN 8.4 million) from the management and employees of Voentorg JSC. The head of the organization has already been detained and the Ministry of Internal Affairs has requested his arrest, the BBC reports, as quoted by News.bg.
In the announcement of the department, it is said that the general director of "Voentorg" has been detained, but his name has not been released. According to information on the "Voentorg" website, the general director is Vladimir Pavlov.
According to the investigation, the head of "Voentorg" together with his accomplices, he concluded state contracts for the supply of "army necessities" worth about 625 million rubles in the period 2019-2022. Then they sold them to the Ministry of Defense at an unreasonably inflated price of more than 400 million rubles. The Ministry of Internal Affairs stated that these actions caused significant financial damage to the Ministry of Defense and the budget of the Russian Federation.
A source from the law enforcement agencies told TASS that former Deputy Defense Minister Dmitry Bulgakov will also be investigated for involvement in these manipulations. RIA Novosti reports that "Voentorg" is also involved in the case against the arrested General Bulgakov for delivering low-quality packages of dry food to the soldiers.
Dmitry Bulgakov became the seventh high-ranking official from the Ministry of Defense to be arrested since April. According to the investigation, he lobbied for the interests of JSC "Gryazinsky Food Factory". from the Lipetsk region, whose three top managers were arrested in April. They are accused of poor organization of food services for the needs of the Ministry of Defense.
"Voentorg" and the Yevgeny Prigozhin-related company "Concord" were also subcontractors for supply of products and food services to the military. In June of last year, Vladimir Putin stated that the owner of "Concord" has earned 80 billion rubles from government contracts through "Voentorg".
Vladimir Pavlov leads "Voentorg" since 2012, when one of the structures associated with Prigozhin began to receive contracts for the supply of food to the army through "Voentorg". The company "Collective-Service" managed by Valery Chekalov, who died together with Prigozhin in a plane crash in August 2023, also appears in numerous arbitration disputes for violations in the organization of soldiers' meals.
### Fixes:
1. **Financial values:** Added a currency sign and additional clarification about the value in BGN.
2. **Grammatical accuracy:** Changed the order of the phrase “then they sold them“ to “then they sold them” for better readability.
3. **Punctuation:** Some commas and periods have been corrected for better sentence structure.