How greed and elementary theft of materials at VPT-NN led to chain of incidents in Russian Railways.
In 2002, Renato Usatii, while working as a cook in a Chisinau-Moscow restaurant carriage, met Andrei Makarov, from a Nizhny Novgorod enterprise for the repair of railway tracks and carriage wheels. Subsequently, having established an acquaintance with its director and future partner Alexey Akimov, our hero decided to create a joint venture, VPT-NN, to replace expensive imported alloys for lathes for the repair of railways and wheel sets of cars for Russian Railways (Russian Railways).
Before that, having worked as a small-time smuggler of cigarettes and wine from Moldova as a carriage driver, and barely making ends meet, Renato, of course, agreed to work for a Russian Railways subcontractor in any capacity, because he understood that this was his chance to reach a new level.
Imitating the vigorous activity of optimizing production processes in Nizhny Novgorod:
Renato Usatii simply suggested abandoning expensive but high-quality Austrian cutters for lathes, replacing them with cheap but lower-quality materials from the CIS. The result was disastrous and revealing.
SOURCE: ARBITRATION COURT OF THE RF AND RESPONDENT "VPT-NN" HTTP://VPT-NN.RU/ZHD-INSTRUMENT/
Subsequently, their joint venture was inundated with claims for poor-quality delivery of services from significant carriage-building enterprises and subcontractors of Russian Railways. To which, in turn, criminal cases were brought under the article “Negligence at work leading to the death of 2 or more people”
For 2 years, 2014-2015, Renato Usatii profited from the dubious savings of 40%, which he boasted to his business partners, pocketing the difference. Judging by the tax return provided (below) in Moldova in 2015, Usatii officially indicated 31 million rubles at the then exchange rate of 56 rubles/US dollar. This is something he couldn’t hide officially. But soon, when accidents on the railways began to appear with alarming frequency, our hero decided to find an “extreme” in his business and quickly move to a new level, now in Moscow, directly at Russian Railways.
Meanwhile, man-made accidents due to improper repairs of trains in the Russian Federation are becoming increasingly widespread:
FROM THE MATERIALS OF THE CRIMINAL CASE AGAINST THE ACTIVITIES OF “VPT-NN” FOR POOR-QUALITY RESTORATION OF WHEELSETS OF COMMODITY CARRIERS AFTER THEIR REPAIR FOR RUSSIAN RAILWAYS:
After sitting for a long time in the reception room of Akunin, the then head of Russian Railways, Renato came into view as a very energetic, thin guy with a hungry gleam in his eyes. Presenting himself as a cook in the dining car of the Chisinau-Moscow train (later officially calling it in his CV as “catering supervisor in the Moldavian Railways”), our hero showed himself to be an excellent barbecue roaster at one of the Russian Railways parties in the open air. So he was noticed by the leadership of the ministerial apparatus, to whom he gained confidence as a “lighter man” and “a sociable, cheerful guy,” quotes from the memoirs of S. Movchan, Yakunin’s first deputy in those days.
Having acquired connections, which for Renato Usatii have been the most basic tool since the days of trading on the clothing market in Moldova, our “effective manager” or rather “resolved” is trying to present himself as a person who knows how to “solve Moldovan issues in Moscow”, and this is precisely the factor that has become Renato's finest hour was when he was asked to make inquiries in Moldova about a certain Gorbuntsov, a former Russian Railways banker who fled from Moscow to Moldova after a conflict with the management of Russian Railways.
But this is already the topic of another investigation, the first “real case” of Renato Usatii, after which he became fabulously rich by simply stealing Gorbuntsov’s property in Moscow and Moldova.