In 2024, we covered a remarkable trial in Moscow’s Basmanny District Court against Kerim Akuyev, the former criminal “head of the judicial department at the Supreme court,” first in occupied Simferopol and then in Donetsk.
A native of Dagestan, Akuyev, after the collapse of the USSR, was actively involved in large-scale food procurement through the “Stavropol-Sever” corporation and was a defendant in a high-profile criminal case involving the embezzlement of 20 billion rubles in budgetary funds for food purchases for state needs.
Subsequently, this valuable figure received a number of awards from the Kremlin and, with the onset of the occupation of Crimea, was transferred to Simferopol to “strengthen justice.”
Among the Crimean scams involving Akuyev, the seizure of the Yalta sanatorium “Parus” and the Yevpatoria sanatorium “Femida” were publicly reported. During this time, Akuyev acquired more than a dozen land plots and properties in prestigious coastal and resort areas of Crimea.
However, Akuyev was jailed for other charges, namely “judicial corruption” and fraudulent “courts’ repairs” in occupied Crimea.
It was alleged that in 2021, Akuyev, through intermediary Tagir Ramazanov, received 2 million rubles to “overturn a decision of the Yalta city court” in a “certain property dispute” in the “civil division of the Supreme vourt” of the occupiers, for transfer to an “unidentified judge.”
It was also reported that in 2021–2022, Akuyev received kickbacks totaling 3.78 million rubles from Oleg Sergienko, the “CEO” of “StroyGarantRemont”, through an intermediary, his “head of the construction department,” Andrey Sedegov. Since 2018, the occupiers have laundered funds through this structure in three dozen contracts “for the renovation of courtrooms.”
We wrote that the punitive forces’ seemingly touching struggle “for purity of ranks,” allegedly “under conditions of the strictest secrecy of the investigation,” which was known to almost everyone in Crimea, has prosaic reasons.
With the onset of large-scale aggression, Akuyev received a “black mark” from an unexpected source: in the summer of 2022, to “strengthen” the repressive apparatus, he was criminally “transferred” to Donetsk to a similar “position,” where he failed to find common ground with Andrei Kim, the fake “head of the Supreme court” there from September 2018 to April 2023.
Akuyev, without hesitation, decided to “go to court,” which sufficiently angered the Moscow bigwigs and earned him the label of “toxic.” The punitive forces, as usual, intervened, overturned all “decisions” against Akuyev, and hastily “picked up” a couple of his “Crimean files” for him.
We wrote that in the case of “corruption in the Crimean courts,” the aggressor’s enforcers have no questions for the “Crimean judges” themselves, and their questions for Kim, “removed” by the occupiers after the scandal with Akuyev, apparently “at the latter’s instigation,” were not “formalized.”
And now Akuyev, Sedegov, and Ramazanov have been sentenced to 14, 9, and 7 years, respectively, in the Temryuk District Court of the Krasnodar Territory. Their “counterparties” will also be sent to similar locations.
The aforementioned Sergienko, as well as Alexey Goloshchapov, the nominees of the firms “Image-Stroy,” “StroyGarantRemont,” and “Liber-Crimea,” were also sentenced to 9 and 8 years, respectively, after allegations of “abuse of power during repairs” in the so-called “Sevastopol garrison military court,” the “Krasnoperekopsk district court,” and the “Supreme court” of the occupiers.
The fate of the aforementioned Kim after 2023 is unknown, but no one has sent him to prison. It is also clear that the beneficiaries of these “firms”, Crimean collaborators, as well as all the “Crimean judges” who closely collaborated with Akuyev, received “light degreasing” and are now firmly on the “agent subscription” of Russian punishers.
