Although the links between the lethal shooting last week of former Russian shipyard owner Andrei Burlakov and the crumbling state of the country’s aviation sector may be indirect, they go a long way to explaining the corruption rife in the industry.
Police sources said the shooting at the Khutorok cafe on 3 Leningradsky Prospekt on Thursday evening was probably a contract killing organized by creditors seeking the repayment of a 50 million ruble taken by Bulyakov to be freed from custody last year.
Burlakov was arrested in 2009 on suspicion of embezzling 1.8 billion rubles ($56 million) from the state-owned Financial Leasing Company (FLC).
The businessman worked at the company, a subsidiary of United Aircraft Corporation, from 2002 to 2009 and served as its first deputy general director for the last four years.
The government bought a 58 percent stake in the FLC in 2002 to finance the acquisition and modernization of Russian-made planes. The string of recent crashes of Soviet-made passenger planes, many of which should have been grounded long ago, is evidence enough to show that something went badly wrong with this aim.
A total of 121 people have been killed in seven crashes this year and the government has announced plans as a result to mothball all Tu-134s, An-24s and Yak-40s by the end of 2011.
Under Burlakov’s leadership the FLC lent 1.8 billion rubles ($55 million) to a fictitious firm called Yug, which redirected them to a Luxemburg-based holding where Burlakov was general director.
Burlakov used the funds to acquire Germany’s Waden Yards.
Metropol transportation analyst Andrei Rozhkov told The Moscow News that the FLC only managed to lease out 17 modern Tu-214 planes during the seven years of its existence.
“The Burlakov story shows that the level of control of financial flows [at the FLC] was definitely too low,” Rozhkov said. “Although I can’t help noticing that Tu-214 planes weren’t too popular with airlines anyway.
Oleg Panteleyev, an analyst at Russia’s Aviaport magazine said that there were some structural flaws in the FLC, which allowed Burlakov to embezzle so much money. The FLC board of directors approved the loan to Yug because the company charter had no clause against investing in non-core assets.
“The company has always been in aviation leasing but never achieved an important role and was looking for alternative businesses,” Panteleev said. “The FLC was created and supported by the state as a company which was to fi- nance the acquisition and modernization of Russian-made planes, but it deviated from its mission, driven by economic incentives.”
When the FLC was probed by the Russian Audit Chamber in 2008, investigators found that the company had invested more money in non-core assets than in the aviation industry itself.
But despite the fact that the entire board of directors had approved the dealings, only Burlakov and his wife Anna Etkina were charged.
Etkina was deputy chairman of Mira Bank, through which the funds were transferred and is currently in intensive care after being seriously wounded during the at- tack on her husband last week.
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