Rucriminal.info has written more than once about the struggle of miners - minority shareholders of the Lebedinsky GOK - for their rights violated by the Kremlin oligarch Alisher Usmanov's company Metalloinvest.
The miners indicate that they lost their shares in the mining and processing plant during a forced buyout, which was made by Usmanov’s structures at prices far from market prices. The assessment was carried out by the company Gorislavtsev and Co. Estimation,” which was based on the fact that the mining and processing plant’s official revenue was less than $1 billion. However, according to the applicants, in reality the revenue was underestimated by at least three times. For tax optimization purposes, products were sold at reduced prices to Usmanov’s offshore companies (BGMT and FMC ltd.), and they then sold them at market prices. As a result, the mining and processing plant's real revenue was at least $3 billion.
Andrey Burkin is the authorized representative of the miners of the Lebedinsky GOK, who lost their shares during a forced buyout at a cheap price, which was made by the structures of Alisher Usmanov.
Now the confrontation between the Metalloinvest company and a group of desperate miners has reached a new level.
According to the source, Metalloinvest first negotiated with a group of minority shareholders of the Lebedinsky GOK, promising them justice, then deceived people several times, went to court for 12 years, and from the beginning of 2023 it entered into intensive negotiations. Offering 2 - 3 million rubles each as social and material assistance to elderly veterans of LGOK. Three pensioners, including a bedridden disabled person, accepted the social program with a mandatory renunciation of claims against the company and its “indirect”, according to the definition of the chairman of the board of directors of LLC Management Company “MetalloInvest” Nazim Efendiev, shareholder Alisher Usmanov.
As an interlocutor told Rucriminal.info, in the end, at the end of November 2023, the parties, with the participation of a German lawyer, reached an agreement: 50% of the amount underpaid in the forced buyout of shares, based on an independent assessment, without taking into account the offshore revenue of the Lebedinsky GOK enterprise. The offshore, with annual revenue from the sale of ore exceeding $3 billion/year, was, of course, controlled not by the miners, but, as follows from Nazim Efendiev’s response to the miners’ German lawyer, by the “indirect shareholder” A.B. Usmanov.
Miners, pensioners, most of whom are disabled workers, having received a draft settlement agreement signed by Mr. Efendiyev on November 23, 2023, confirmed the authority of Andrei Burkin as the only able-bodied and educated member of the group of minority shareholders, since the old people had already been deceived more than once by the oligarch’s company.
According to the source, the agreement was violated by representatives of Metalloinvest, the terms of which they themselves proposed, while accusing the group’s official representative Andrei Burkin of blackmail and extortion.
On January 31, 2024, at six o’clock in the morning, an investigative committee task force from Moscow raided the apartment of Andrei and Vika Burkin. Without the sanction of the prosecutor or generally observing any procedural norms, a rude search was carried out and the personal belongings of the Burkin family were confiscated, and Andrei and Vika were escorted to a Moscow pre-trial detention center.
“The company’s lawyers do not disdain anything to achieve their goals! Neither forgery of documents, which the old people did not sign, nor threats. The company's agent, a certain Burykin Denis, immediately after the illegal detention of the Burkin family, carried out a terrifying night raid in order to intimidate sick old people. Burykin, unceremoniously breaking into the apartments of old people late at night, demanded that they sign a waiver of their signatures on the agreement with the German lawyer from whom he was supposedly delegated. If he refused to immediately comply with his demands, he threatened with collectors, courts, deprivation of the latter’s property, etc.,” the interlocutor told Rucriminal.info.
Burkin and his wife are charged with extortion under Article 163 of Art. Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.
In connection with the above, does the source have a number of questions?
1. Why does a local economic dispute between JSC Lebedinsky GOK and a group of Gubkin miners become federal and criminal in nature?
2. Why are Andrei Burkin and his wife, who is not a shareholder of OJSC Lebedinsky GOK, who is not part of the group of miners seeking justice, detained, searched, confiscated personal property, and then forcibly taken to Moscow by employees of the Moscow Investigative Committee, and not Are they conducting investigative actions on the spot?
3. Why were only Andrei Burkin and his wife, who represented the interests of the group, detained, and not all the old “extortionists” on whose behalf Andrei acted? Not one of the group members who signed all the letters and appeals was even officially informed about what happened or interviewed as a witness?
4. Why, right now, Andrei Burkin has become so important for Alisher Usmanov and Farhad Moshiri?
Is it because a testimony was scheduled for February 14 of this year in the German prosecutor's office in the case of the Metalloinvest group of companies related to the documents that appeared and evidence of tax evasion by this group of companies in EU jurisdiction amounting to $2 billion per year?
5. How to explain - November 29, 2023 General Director of Metalloinvest N.T. Efendiyev personally sends Burkin an invitation to sign a compromise version of the settlement agreement proposed by Metalloinvest itself (!), with the choice of location, and during the negotiations the company’s position is changed by Alex Tumanyan, who offered Andrey Burkin a “personal bonus of an indirect shareholder” in the amount of 48 million rubles. provided that he persuades the group to agree to half the amount and leaves the group.
Being an honest man, Andrei Burkin refused virtually half a million euros! After which the negotiations were disrupted by the company's lawyers.
And the last question is why Andrei Burkin has become so dangerous to society that he should be given a harsh measure of restraint with imprisonment in a pre-trial detention center, even if we hypothetically imagine a crime that simply does not exist.
Burkin never called the company, did not write threats with demands, and did not commit a single action falling under the definitions of Art. 163 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. The main argument of the hastily concocted criminal case from the lawyers of Farhad Ardavan Moshiri is a written confirmation of readiness for negotiations, proposed by Nazim Tofikovich Efendiev himself!
The company asked to sign and send by e-mail the proposed letter for formal negotiations.
Yuri Prokov
Source: www.rucriminal.info