As Fontanka wrote earlier, the deputy’s assistant (formally he was employed by deputy Sergei Kupchenko) was detained on July 30, 2021 while receiving money. According to Andrei Grishin, force was used once morest him during his arrest, following which he needed medical assistance. According to the FSB, Grishin tried to escape.
An application once morest Koval and his assistant was written by businessman Mikhail Likholetov, who paid the parliamentarian for lobbying for the allocation of funds to the city’s medical institutions through a deputy amendment to the budget. Likholetov’s companies won tenders for the supply of medical equipment to these hospitals and clinics, he gave 20% of the contracts to the deputy through his assistant Andrey Grishin.
At the end of 2021, Koval’s assistant made a deal with the investigation and told regarding another episode, it concerned a similar interaction with the entrepreneur Anton Sidorov, the owner of the Rubin company.
According to the Investigative Committee, from 2018 to 2020, Koval and Grishin received a total of 16.9 million rubles from businessman Mikhail Likholetov.
At the end of 2020, Koval and his assistant confessed. The ex-deputy, however, insisted that his actions should be qualified not under the article on a bribe, but under the article “fraud” – following all, from a legal point of view, the deputy has no opportunity to influence the conclusion of state contracts, this is done by the administrations of medical institutions.
July 12 Koval retracted previous testimony. He stated that he was familiar with Likholetov and lent him money, which he gradually gave them back. The confession, he argued, had been forced into him by a former lawyer who said the courts didn’t like acquittals.
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