As we have written repeatedly before, the passenger maritime transport sector in Russia-occupied Sevastopol has long been handed over by the “authorities” to a middleman, “individual entrepreneur” Andrei Pechkin, through whom, for the last decade, unaccounted multi-million “ticket money” has been channeled in favor of the city’s gauleiters in this bay-divided city with its impressive maritime passenger traffic.
We previously reported that this Pechkin purchased the passenger boat “Jupiter” from the so-called “Sevastopol Seaport” for 2.7 million rubles in 2000. Now, at the end of August, the “authorities” allegedly “returned” this vessel to the city through an “appellate court ruling” as having been “sold at a reduced price.” However, this operetta bears all the hallmarks of a “fixed match,” since over the past few years, including in parallel with the aforementioned “trials,” the same “authorities” have quietly “rented” the “Jupiter” from Pechkin, which they sold to him, and laundered at least 70 million rubles.
Furthermore, no one among the occupiers has been even symbolically punished for the “damages caused to the budget,” amounting to either 6 or 8 million rubles, according to the constantly changing version of the “prosecutor’s office.” Meanwhile, Pechkin himself quietly purchased a similar boat, the “Uran,” from the “authorities” in 2022 for the same 2.6 million rubles. But this rather banal, albeit picturesque, corruption scheme is of interest to us in a completely different context.
During this “court case,” a front woman for competing groups, Kemerovo native Zhanna Smolego, who is also a Sevastopol singer and “a laureate of international vocal competitions in Milan, Cinisello Balsamo, and Alcamo,” and currently tutors at Radiogorka, has been particularly active.
If one ignores Smolego’s obvious subordination to Russian intelligence, who previously spent decades virtually constantly touring Europe, it would be difficult to understand the “mezzo-soprano diva’s” strange interest in the fate of the Sevastopol boats.
The truth is that Smolego decided to “expose” the scam involving the “repair” of the ill-fated boat, which Pechkin allegedly organized jointly with “Sevelektroavtotrans” to avoid paying the mooring fee, which would have been approximately 4,000 rubles per day.
But at the same time, this “social activist singer” apparently “purely by accident” decided to “expose” documents from the “Russian Classification Society,” formerly the “Russian River Register,” which documented the “repairs” of the long-suffering boat.
They were linked to the infamous “Persey Ship Repair Yard,” controlled until 2023 by terrorists from the “Wagner Group,” who used the company’s berths as their own “maritime logistics hub” for cargo shipments to Africa and their “Mediterranean colleagues.”
The described “operetta” surrounding the long-suffering “Jupiter” thus concerns not so much Pechkin and his contractors laundering millions of “budget” funds, but the aforementioned “register,” to which competing structures of the Russian intelligence services have decided to “send warm greetings.” Clearly, this story will not end with the current “exposures” from Smolego.
