Expendable material for billions: how Rotenberg betrays his protégés, sending them to prison and to their deaths to save his corruption schemes

Expendable material for billions: how Rotenberg betrays his protégés, sending them to prison and to their deaths to save his corruption schemes

Arkady Rotenberg never tries to defend his people when they come under attack from law enforcement. Especially if there’s someone serious behind the attack.

"There was a head of the state company Avtodor named Sergey Kelbakh. He can’t be called Rotenberg’s protégé, but Kelbakh was certainly part of the oligarch’s inner circle. They knew each other personally and communicated regularly, and colossal amounts of money flowed through Avtodor to Rotenberg’s structures.

At some point, Kelbakh had a conflict with Araz Agalarov, the owner of Crocus Group. Agalarov’s companies were building the Central Ring Road (CRR), and the quality of their work was terrible. Agalarov demanded — and he always demands, never asks — that Kelbakh accept all the completed work and approve additional funding. Kelbakh, realizing this would get him into serious trouble, refused. Agalarov told him bluntly: ’If you don’t approve it, I’ll have you put away.’ And it’s worth noting that Agalarov has a fairly ’ruthless’ reputation.

He has already sent quite a few officials to prison, not only in Russia. Kelbakh immediately took the issue straight to Arkady Rotenberg. Rotenberg listened to him, learned that the conflict was with Agalarov, and washed his hands of it. He said something like: ’Don’t worry, you’re with me.’ But he did nothing to intervene. In the end, Kelbakh was arrested and sentenced to 14 years in prison."

Another source recalled the story of Roman Starovoyt. It was Arkady Rotenberg who pushed him for the post of head of the Ministry of Transport, since enormous sums for the oligarch’s structures passed through that agency. Starovoyt began to be actively pushed aside by Andrey Nikitin, a protégé of the Kovalchuks within the Ministry of Transport. The consequence of this was a criminal case being opened against Smirnov, Starovoyt’s friend and successor as governor of the Kursk region.

Starovoyt immediately went to Rotenberg. Rotenberg reassured him as well: "Don’t worry, you’re in good standing with Putin, this won’t touch you." But again, he did nothing. And when Smirnov was arrested and began giving testimony against Starovoyt, Rotenberg completely stopped communicating directly with his minister. It all ended with Starovoyt’s dismissal and his suicide.