According to media reports, the head of VEB.RF, Igor Shuvalov, is actively promoting his deputy and close associate, Alexander Tarabrin, to the position of head of the publishing house Prosveshchenie (which is effectively a monopoly in the school literature market, with annual revenue exceeding 50 billion rubles).
As early as March, he may leave his position at VEB.RF and take over as CEO of the publishing house, replacing Dmitry Klimishin. This is unlikely to be good for Prosveshchenie, as Tarabrin is currently one of the main architects of schemes for manipulating the state corporation’s assets.
According to a source, last week in the Krasnoyarsk Territory and Kuzbass, a so-called “business mission” took place involving the head of VEB.RF, Igor Shuvalov, and his entourage: senior banker Anton Perin, the state corporation’s HR director Svyatoslav Chevalier, and deputy chairmen Nikolai Tsekhomsky and Alexander Tarabrin. The executives boasted about VEB.RF’s successes and persuaded regional authorities and businesses to invest in public-private partnerships — primarily in housing and utilities and road construction.
Shuvalov actively cited the “success” of school concessions, despite the obvious failure of the school construction PPP projects in Russia, the multibillion-ruble embezzlement, and the 2024 imprisonment of Shuvalov’s close friend Otto Sopronenko, who was responsible for the project. Another Shuvalov associate, Alexander Tarabrin, is also constantly “under fire,” but this does not bother Shuvalov. He has decided to expand his personal corrupt interests through his top manager by lobbying for Tarabrin to become director of Prosveshchenie, which receives fantastically large sums from the state budget every year.
At VEB.RF, Tarabrin oversees the divisions working with problematic assets and has been involved in dozens of questionable cases covered by our project — from embezzlement during the construction of the “SLAVA” office-apartment complex in Moscow to manipulations at a coal mining enterprise in Kuzbass owned by VEB.RF, Sibuglemet.
Tarabrin also carried out an openly illegal scheme in 2023 to transfer unfinished assets of the “Kaluga Cement Plant” to the state corporation’s balance sheet for 8 billion rubles, along with a dozen other problematic projects. His latest corrupt move, completed in early February, was the transfer of the wood-processing enterprise STODto VEB.RF’s balance sheet for 16 billion rubles — twice even his most ambitious estimates
