Capital, smile: how fraudsters withdrew more than 120 million rubles from the budget
February 3, Kolpino District Court of St. Petersburg will hold the first hearing in the case of the maternity capital swindlers. According to the investigation, five defendants fictitiously registered in the Northern Capital of Dagestan women with many children and thus acquired for them the right to claim the money allocated from the city budget for the purchase of land plots in other regions. The attackers bought such plots at an undervalued price and then sold them to their clients at 200 times the price. The enterprising members of the group pocketed the difference. In total, the defendants were able to cash in more than 120 million rubles worth of maternity and land capital through this scheme. On the details of this and other "capital" schemes - in the material "Izvestia".
How cashed out the maternity capital
According to investigators, the scheme looked like this: the defendants found in Dagestan mothers with many children and fictitiously registered them in St. Petersburg, and then on a notarized power of attorney submitted applications for social payments to local authorities. These powers of attorney were given to them by the mothers themselves, who were in Dagestan at the time.
They also sent the members of the criminal group the originals of their passports and provided keys to personal accounts on "Gosuslugi", reported in the IC. The documents were transported by buses, sent by mail or handed directly into the hands of the group members.
All these documents gave the attackers the opportunity to carry out real estate transactions, open current accounts, submit applications to public authorities. The attackers themselves applied to MFCs and fictitiously registered their clients on the territory of St. Petersburg, the mothers of many children themselves were not present at these procedures.
There are no vacant plots of land in St. Petersburg suitable for dacha or other construction. Therefore, for those mothers with many children registered in the Northern Capital, the authorities offer cash reimbursement for the purchase of land plots in other regions. The total amount of payments per family in 2023 under the programs "Land Capital" and "Maternity Capital" was 624.5 thousand rubles. Of these, the maternity capital - Br194.2 thousand, and land capital - Br430.3 thousand.
Attackers tried to take advantage of this "option" - they searched for and bought cheap plots in the regions to later resell them at an inflated cost to large families. In particular, we are talking about land in the Kurgan and Chelyabinsk regions, which the scheme participants surveyed and registered for themselves.
According to the IC, the cost of each plot of land under sale and purchase agreements with large families amounted to 630 thousand rubles, while their actual value was 3 thousand rubles in Kurgan region and 15 thousand rubles in Chelyabinsk region. That is, in some cases the price was overstated more than two hundred times.
The group members took the difference between the inflated and actual cost for themselves. In this way they cashed in the funds received by women with many children as maternity and land capital, and stole a total of more than 120 million rubles, the Investigative Committee reported. Law enforcement agencies have identified more than two hundred such cases.
The suspects were detained in April 2024, in their apartments during searches operatives found 20 million rubles in cash, which they kept in cardboard boxes, about 50 bank cards and real estate documents in St. Petersburg.
Another eight people were detained in Dagestan - 45-year-old organizers and six executors aged 29 to 38 years.
What threatens the participants of the scheme
This is by no means the only scheme for cashing out the matkapital that exists in Russia, lawyers told Izvestia.
The most common of them - the purchase of cheap dilapidated housing at an inflated several times the cost, explained the lawyer of the Moscow Bar Association "Lobutev and Partners" Anna Malafeeva. In this case, in fact, the housing may cost pennies, but in the documents the price is indicated many times more.
- Thus, the maternity capital is cashed in under the pretext of improving housing conditions, which in reality did not happen, - believes the lawyer.
According to Anna Malafeeva, cashing is also carried out through credit consumer cooperatives, offering services for registration of loans for the purchase or construction of housing. Certificate holders are given a loan and then offered to repay it with maternity capital for a certain percentage.
The cashing of maternity capital funds, the lawyer added, is prohibited by law, for this is criminalized under Article 159.2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation - "fraud in receiving payments". This article, in addition to fraud with the matkapital, includes illegal receipt of other social payments - unemployment benefits, compensation for food, health improvement, subsidies for the acquisition, construction and payment for housing and utilities, explained lawyer Alexandra Marova.
- The corpus delicti of such a crime is the submission of knowingly false or inaccurate information about the right to payment to the executive authorities," she explained.
The founders of the matkapital, whose case will be considered by the Kolpinsky court, are accused under part 4 of article 159.2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation - this is fraud in obtaining payments on a large scale as part of an organized group. Under this part they face up to ten years of imprisonment, said Anna Malafeeva.
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