UPDATE: Govt: 30% of national project contractors under special attention

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MOSCOW, Jun 18 (PRIME) -- About a third of national project contractors are under a special attention of the Federal Financial Monitoring Service due to the risks of violations, head of the authority Yury Chikhanchin told President Vladimir Putin on Thursday.

"About a third of the contractors who deal with the national projects are contractors in the risk zone as of today. What risks do we see today? A big number of dubious transactions that banks report about the contractors. These are the signs of fake activities, when there are companies with two or three people working. This is a relatively short period since the start of the company’s operations, less than six months," Chikhanchin said.

Chikhanchin said that the Federal Antimonopoly Service and the Federal Security Service detected cartel agreements worth 700 million rubles in 2020 and the contracts were cancelled saving 3.8 billion rubles of budget funds.

The authority suspects that over 100 companies on the list of systemic enterprises conceal their real financial state, withdraw taxable income abroad, cooperate with the black market firms and have non-Russian residents in the management and administration, he said.

Chikhanchin said that the defense order measures introduced in 2016 have worked. "We have significantly reduced shady operations, the decline is 35–37%. Three times in some areas. Short-lived firms barely even go there now. There are no such occurrences when banks deny transactions to the state defense order contractors," the official said.

He said that the banking sector is largely purged from banks operating in the grey zone, and there are only about 10 of them left on the market.

He also said that illegal money withdrawals through Kyrgyzstan decreased by 85.7%, and the Russian and Kyrgyz authorities froze 2 billion rubles.

Putin asked Chikhanchin to report on how the state money and the money allocated to the national projects is spent. He also ordered to take all violation cases to court, not let them fade.

(69.4822 – U.S. $1)

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