How and why Putin’s bodyguard was poisoned

Oleg Pipchenkov was the head of the investigative and operational group investigating the high-profile criminal case of the St. Petersburg authoritative businessman Vladimir Kumarin.

The decline of Vladimir Barsukov-Kumarin came in 2007. According to our sources, Kumarin got burned on nonsense because of the lack of a sense of self-preservation. Having seized the Peterburgsky Dvorik restaurant in the very center of the northern capital in the mid-2000s, it was a mere trifle on the scale of the Tambovskaya gang, the “businessman” Kumarin essentially pronounced a sentence on himself. As it turned out, the owner of the restaurant was Natalya Shpakova, a friend of the Governor of St. Petersburg, Valentina Matvienko. It was this fact that became decisive during the landing of the investigative and operational landing at Pulkovo Airport in August 2007.

A hastily initiated criminal case was then conducted by representatives of the Prosecutor General’s Office, and operational escort was under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs together with the Federal Security Service. The materials contained only two episodes of raider seizures. One concerned the “Petersburg Courtyard” on the corner of Nevsky Prospekt and Pushkinskaya Square, and the second – the Smolninsky store on Nevsky Prospekt itself. But in September of the same 2007, an Investigative Committee under the Prosecutor’s Office was created. The case of Kumarin becomes the first high-profile case of the new investigative body, and it is Oleg Pipchenkov who is appointed to lead the investigative group.

According to our sources, Pipchenkov zealously set to work. While still working in the Prosecutor’s Office of the city of Moscow, he specialized specifically in bandits, authorities, and organized criminal communities. He knew firsthand how to work with this contingent of people and was not particularly liberal. His subordinates very quickly found out that the criminal activity of the “Tambov group” was not limited to the seizure of two objects. New episodes began to appear in the case, including several contract killings and participation in the affairs of the Barsukov-Kumarin group of high-ranking St. Petersburg security officials and representatives of the city administration.

Oleg Pipchenkov managed to attract to his side the “authorities”

Oleg Makovoz and Badri Shengelia, who later became the main witnesses for the prosecution. Both at one time were close to businessman Kumarin and both agreed to a deal with the investigation. But if the interest of Badri Shengelia, who was also accused of raider seizures, was to receive the least punishment in court, then St. Petersburg policemen accused Oleg Makovoz of a whole series of contract killings. And the court managed to sentence him to 23 years in prison. And this is serious. However, the very first check of the materials collected in the case of Makovoz made investigators from Moscow doubt the legal actions of the St. Petersburg law enforcement agencies.

Oleg Makovoz’s streak of bad luck, began in the early 2000s when a certain Alexei Mironov approached him with a request to arrange a meeting with Roman Tsepov, head of the security company Baltic Escort. At one time, “Baltik-Escort” had an agreement on the protection of the first persons of the city and their foreign guests. One of the protected was the vice-mayor and head of the committee on foreign relations, Vladimir Putin. The same private security company also guarded the family of Anatoly Sobchak. Sobchak himself was under the protection of the FSO. Tsepov was personally well acquainted with Putin and with many prominent representatives of the northern capital.

The essence of the issue that Alexey Mironov planned to discuss with Tsepov was to help appoint his man to the position of head of Astrakhan-Gazprom, a subsidiary of the Russian gas monopoly. Tsepov answered positively but refused to meet with Mironov, and asked for five and a half million dollars for his services. All negotiations took place through Makovoz, who transferred the money and was the guarantor of the fulfillment of all obligations.

Our sources in the special services said that Tsepov resolved the issues of appointment to a position in Gazprom and its subsidiaries through Sergei Lukash, deputy chairman of the board for the security of the gas monopoly. Mironov knew this. By early 2003, he began to get nervous. The money was transferred, the necessary appointment did not happen, and in February, on top of everything else, it became known that Sergei Lukash was dismissed from his post.

Responsibility for the return of money, of course, fell on Makovoz. On this basis, a conflict broke out between him and Roman Tsepov. Tsepov refused to return the money. Instead, he organizes an assassination attempt on Makovoz (Criminal case No. 2-30/06). But the murder breaks down, and its organizer Denis Dolgushin and the performers of some Yu. Sudnev and the Bobylev brothers are arrested.

Dolgushin does not hold out for long during the investigation and confesses to a whole bunch of contract killings. Another defendant appears in the case, he is also the customer – Vladimir Barsukov-Kumarin, on whose instructions these crimes were committed. But in February-March 2004, according to our information, Kumarin organized a meeting with Dolgushin right on the premises of the Central Internal Affairs Directorate for St. Petersburg, after which Dolgushin changes his testimony and, in some miraculous way, instead of “Kum”, Oleg becomes the customer of all the murders Makovoz. And the operational support of the new high-profile case is personally led by the then head of the criminal police of St. Petersburg Vladislav Piotrovsky.

For Tsepov, this story also ended sadly. On September 11, 2004, Roman Tsepov felt very unwell and the driver took him to the nearest hospital. Doctors immediately assumed poisoning, but for a long time, they could not determine the poisonous substance. Tsepov was getting worse, he lost consciousness, the doctors talked about cerebral edema and shrugged. Tsepov’s relatives began negotiations with a clinic in Germany, but the doctors advised against transporting the patient. Finally, doctors found that Tsepov’s bone marrow was damaged, and on September 22 he was transferred to the Sverdlov City Hospital, where transplants were performed. But the next day after the transfer, the patient died.

In 2008, the Investigative Committee of the UPC, headed by Oleg Pipchenkov, will discover a forgery in the materials of the Makovoz case. The latter will be cleared of charges of murdering four people, taken under state protection, and a blood trail will also appear in the case of the “night governor of St. Petersburg”.     

But in the court, the “Tambovskaya” will be judged only for raider seizures. The Prosecutor General’s Office, with stubborn constancy, returns episodes of murders for additional investigation. And in the press, there were publications in which the St. Petersburg police officers talk about the appearance of Makovoz, accused of murders, in city cafes and restaurants under the protection of the FSB officers and with the permission of the investigator Pipchenkov.