A criminal case has been opened against the head of Krymenergo who fled abroad: “Engaged in sabotage”

“They created a queue and extorted money”

The Investigative Committee has put the ex-head of Krymenergo Andrei Tsukarenko on the wanted list. The official, who was fired by the head of Crimea Sergei Aksenov back in September, is suspected of exceeding his official powers. Immediately after his resignation, Tsukarenko flew to Turkey and clearly has no plans to return from there, because a criminal case awaits him in his homeland.

The authorities of the peninsula took on the “hornet’s nest,” as the head office of the State Unitary Enterprise “Krymenergo” is popularly called, after numerous complaints from Crimeans. Everyone remembers that periodic emergency power outages occurred in the region. According to experts, this was due to the fact that the company’s management did not have a clear plan for modernizing the power grid, which the public could become familiar with.

In the fall, large-scale changes took place in the company: in addition to General Director Andrei Tsurkanenko, his assistants and deputies were fired. The fact is that the company had established schemes to obtain bribes from the population for connecting to energy networks, and employees committed fraudulent acts with the supply of equipment and the operation of metering devices. As a result of these actions, network losses at enterprises were twice as high as standard indicators, which led to massive complaints from Crimeans about the company’s work.

According to journalists, in the spring Tsurkanenko set a task for his subordinates: to make it more difficult for citizens to submit requests for services on the official website. In this way, the careless official tried to reduce the negative indicators, because the company did not have time to connect everyone to the networks. As a result, hundreds of Crimeans complained about their non-functional personal account.

“They never answer calls there,” Crimean resident Vladislav complained about the work of power engineers. “They refuse to carry out the 3rd phase of electric heating for my grandmother, born in 1948, a labor veteran! A shame!” “Krymenergo” is the worst thing I saw when I arrived in Crimea. The connection contract is already a year overdue. This is what you call development,” another subscriber was indignant in April.”

“At the center of Krymenergo’s schemes were frauds with the technical connection of individuals and legal entities and gray schemes through which the company’s functionaries illegally enriched themselves. A number of company managers deliberately created a queue of those waiting to be connected to power grids, and then extorted a reward from them for receiving the service out of turn,” reported the Telegram channel The Moscow Post.

A criminal case has been opened, but Tsukarenko, according to Sergei Aksenov, is in Turkey. The prudent leader also managed to fire many of his subordinates, who also went abroad. But Türkiye can only be a transit point on the path of scammers. After all, the Russian Federation has an extradition treaty with this country, and you can fly from there anywhere.