1.MS2210151899 kommersant 21 oct -- russian designer denies crime, says gold was planted

[Article by Sergey Leskov: "It Is From Here That People Are Sent Into Space. Anatoliy Nedayvoda's Bank Safety Deposit Box Found To Contain $1.6 Million"; followed by boxed unattributed report]

[FBIS Translated Text] It is, perhaps, appropriate to say "let's go" ["Poyekhali" -- allusion to Soviet cosmonaut Yuriy Gagarin's exclamation before the first manned flight] for the second time in the history of space exploration. Space exploration, which opened up a new era for the world, has now entered a new stage itself. In the past, it was regarded as a romantic pursuit with geniuses and totally unselfish people serving the cause. It has now turned out that space exploration is based on the same laws as any other pseudomarket business of ours is. We know now: Space design bureaus are tarred with the same brush as commercial outlets, bank formations, and all sort of crafty joint ventures.

A scandal has occurred which is unprecedented in the entire history of our much exalted conquest of stellar orbits. When safety deposit boxes in a branch of Sobinbank were opened it transpired that the world-renowned designer Anatoliy Nedayvoda, the creator of the Proton and Rokot rockets and the Mir orbital station, is the owner of $1.6 million. The safety deposit boxes were opened because Sobinbank figures in the scandal involving money laundering via the Bank of New York.

According to information obtained from the designer's closest entourage, he received the $1.6 million as a Sobinbank loan for building a house on Rublevskoye Highway. Nedayvoda had put up his three Moscow apartments as loan security. He himself lives in one of those apartments, in Fili. The second one, on Sretenka, used to belong to his mother, and the third apartment, on Udaltsov Street, was purchased recently and is empty. Incidentally, the president's chief administrator of affairs, Pavel Borodin, lives in the same house. This apartment alone has been estimated at $800,000.

You do not have to be an experienced real estate agent to figure out that the bank loan far exceeds the value of the realty on the security of which it has been issued, even though the opposite is normally the case. The astronomical sum of cash discovered in the modest safety deposit box is also at variance with traditional banking practices. Such amounts of cash do not figure in cases of legitimate financial operations. Those who are well versed in our country's normal banking practices will suspect a typical instance of "kickback" ["otkat"] here.

Let us leave the origin and the amount of the cash for the competent organs to deal with. There is something more important for us to comprehend. How come veritable Rothschilds emerge in a defense industry which laments its chronic poverty? A campaign to save the Mir station designed at the Salyut Design Bureau is getting under way in our country. Patriots are taking the hat round, and yet they have collected $70,000 over several months -- a pittance compared with the money in the private pocket of one of Mir's creators.

How could a scientist whose official salary as the Salyut Design Bureau's general designer and deputy general director of the Khrunichev State Space Science and Production Center comes to $700 a month amass such a fortune? Lecturing at the Moscow Aviation Technology Institute -- yet another shelter for the poverty-stricken intellectual elite -- could hardly have helped. But the general designer's other pursuit could be a gold mine. We are talking about the joint ventures that only foolish leaders fail to surround themselves with nowadays.

Yes, in addition to the state posts, Anatoliy Nedayvoda, member of the Committee for State Awards, is also on the board of two Russian-U.S. joint ventures. It is not through state orders (5-10 percent of the budget) that the Khrunichev and Salyut state enterprises keep going, it is thanks to their commercial activities. A single Proton launch fetches $70 million. Russia is scheduled to conduct seven commercial launches of Proton in 1999. At the same time, the average salary at Khrunichev and Salyut -- and these are the Russian defense industry's most prosperous enterprises -- does not exceed $100 a month....

It turns out that our defense industry does have money. The problem lies in its efficient utilization. The task is to see to it that the financial affairs of enterprises are managed in such a way that the money is not pumped through joint ventures, or transferred to Western banks, or does not end up in the pockets of individual leaders. It should be spent in the best interests of our state and society.

It may well be that Anatoliy Nedayvoda is an honest person as far as the law is concerned. So much the worse for the state espousing such a law.

[Unattributed boxed report] The confiscation of the contents of the Sobinbank safety deposit boxes was carried out by staffers of the interagency center for countering the legalization of illegally acquired income recently established under Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs. The center's chief, Aleksandr Mikhaylenko, has told Izvestiya that only the packages containing the $1.6 million were found in Anatoliy Nedayvoda's safety deposit box. The gold bars without the hallmark but bearing the stamp of a Russian factory were found in a neighboring safety deposit box and have nothing to do with the academician. According to A. Mikhaylenko, after the scientist found out about the opening of his safety deposit box he showed signs of nervousness and said at first that the money did not belong to him and that he had simply been asked to look after it. Nedayvoda was unable to specify who precisely had asked him to do that, but then altered his story and admitted that the money was his. According to his story, he obtained the money from that same Sobinbank as a loan secured on his realty. The bank would not corroborate this information -- its press secretary Yekaterina Ilvovskaya said that the bank was not going to disclose any information about its clients.

According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, no criminal case has yet been instituted against Anatoliy Nedayvoda, and he provided all the explanations, including those about his own money, as a witness in the case involving the illegal banking activities of the Flamingo commercial bank.

Despite the perfectly natural indignation that the general designer's activities have provoked (incidentally, this indignation may well verge on envy in the consciousness of the ordinary citizen), we are dealing with yet another case testifying to the troglodytic crudeness of the Russian economy.

It is crude to poke through other people's safety deposit boxes. But this practice is not banned in Russia -- there is no such thing as secrecy of bank deposits in our country.

It is crude to issue $1.5 million in cash -- even when secured on apartments.

It is crude to grumble right and left about the fact that high-tech industries -- "Russia's technological pride" -- are dying from a lack of funding, while the leaders of such plants resort to precisely the same type of thievery as do the leaders of banal raw-materials industries.

A person who resorted to crude business practice has been crudely caught red-handed. Just as in America. About 170 years ago. [Description of Source: Izvestiya -- One of Russia's most prominent dailies, now controlled by Vladimir Potanin's Oneksimbank.]

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