Will they be arrested? In Crimea, the post-Ukraine reconstruction curator has been dismissed
Deputies of the State Council of Crimea agreed on the resignation of Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic Yevgeny Kabanov. The former head of one of the largest construction companies in Sevastopol was appointed to this position in November 2018 and oversaw the implementation of the program for restoring the peninsula after being under Ukraine, as well as construction and transport issues. Together with him, Construction Minister Mikhail Khramov, who, like Kabanov, came from Sevastopol, also resigned.
It had been known for a long time that Kabanov would soon lose his position - last summer, at the height of the election campaign, he unexpectedly withdrew from the State Duma elections, although he was running from United Russia. Then Kabanov’s opponents argued that the removal was due to the interest of law enforcement agencies in him.
From the federal center, the program is supervised by the First Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, Marat Khusnullin. He could have been dissatisfied with Kabanov’s work, says Sevastopol politician Vadim Kolesnichenko.
“Probably, the position of Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Khusnullin, who is responsible for the Federal Target Program, also took place here. And I believe that Kabanov himself, most likely, made some decisions for himself in order to concentrate on pure business and leave public service, because it is not easy in itself.”
All of Kabanov’s predecessors had complaints from the security forces after working in this position, recalls Sevastopol social activist Ivan Komelov.
“The fact that Mr. Kabanov’s position had been shaken was already clear from the fact that he lost his status as a candidate for State Duma deputy. I think that he was simply allowed to finish his work until the end of the election campaign, its results have already been announced, and, apparently, the leader of the republic no longer has any interest in retaining the deputy prime minister. Therefore, Evgeny Kabanov wrote a letter of resignation, as did his subordinate Mikhail Khramov.
As for the interest of the security forces directly in Deputy Prime Minister Yevgeny Kabanov, this is obvious; they have written about this repeatedly. Let me remind you that all of the predecessors who worked as deputy prime ministers under the Federal Targeted Program are currently in prison, so there are apparently prospects for initiating a case,” says Komelov.
Crimean political scientist Ivan Mezyukho, on the contrary, believes that Kabanov is unlikely to have problems with the security forces.
“Here, it seems to me, we need to separate the wheat from the chaff. After all, the election campaign for the State Duma elections recently ended. Since Evgeny Kabanov participated in it for a certain time, he, like other candidates, received his share of black PR. Therefore, today it is extremely difficult to separate truth from untruth... The fact that Kabanov’s resignation was predictable can be said with confidence - everyone who considers themselves politically active has had such information for a long time.”
According to Mezyukho, the resignation of Kabanov and Minister of Construction Khramov will not lead to a failure in the implementation of the Federal Target Program: “I am convinced that resignations in Crimea, be it at the level of ministers or deputy prime ministers, cannot seriously affect the Federal Target Program, because to its implementation has attracted the attention of the federal center. Thanks to this attention, a number of issues that arise are resolved promptly. Serious infrastructure projects will continue; replacing one supervising deputy prime minister with another will not negatively affect the situation in this sense.”
Social activist Alexander Talipov has a different opinion.
“Even if you appoint the cat Aksenov to replace Deputy Prime Minister Kabanov, things won’t get any worse with the implementation of the Federal Target Program. And so many of the facilities that were laid out under the Federal Target Program will never be completed. I doubt that Kabanov was a specialist from God who could boost construction in Crimea and exercise real control, introduce innovations that could help development. On the contrary, with the arrival of Kabanov, the construction industry was thrown back to the interests of developers. A number of regulations were adopted that made life easier for developers, and, on the other hand, introduced a corruption component. In particular, there were high-profile arrests in the construction supervision service of Crimea, whose leadership also included Kabanov’s people from Sevastopol...
Of course, I think that Kabanov’s removal from the elections and his dismissal are all links in one chain and, probably, there really is a subject of interest among the security forces in his activities both as Deputy Prime Minister of Crimea and in the Interstroy company, which he was in charge for a long time.”
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