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Eduard Shmonin, a journalist from Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, who was sentenced to 8 years in a strict regime colony, taken out to the Novosibirsk “torture” SIZO-1 before considering the appeal against his sentence. Shmonin was tried in a case of libel and distribution of pornography, which was initiated after the release of his investigation into embezzlement at a subsidiary of Rosneft. In the report, the journalist claimed that security officials, including people from the FSB, were involved in the theft.
Criminal cases of libel and distribution of pornography against journalist Eduard Shmonin were opened after the publication in November 2016 video “Criminal Oil” on his OTV channel. It talked about the system of theft of oil products from the pipelines of JSC Samotlorneftegaz – this is one of the key production enterprises of NK Rosneft in Western Siberia.
According to an anonymous source of Shmonin, the illegal business of pumping oil products through illegal “tie-ins” into the pipeline was “protected” by the security service of Samotlorneftegaz, as well as representatives of the police and the FSB.
The report said that, among others, the Deputy Director for Economic Security of Samotlorneftegaz, FSB General in the reserve, Igor Verstakov, was involved in the theft of oil. His predecessor in this post, the former head of the Nizhnevartovsk police department, Sergei Dobrocheev, was also associated with criminal structures, Shmonin reported. According to him, Dobrocheev and the head of the company’s security service, Mikhail Miroshnichenko, oversaw the sale of pipes (the so-called “macaroni”) using forged documents. When an audit initiated by the leadership of Rosneft revealed violations, Dobrocheev and Miroshnichenko were removed from their posts. However, under Verstakov, the criminal scheme “improved,” Shmonin said in a report.
According to him, the safety of transporting stolen oil products was provided by the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Nizhnevartovsk region, Valery Kishkilev. Illegal cargo was transported, in particular, to an oil depot owned by the Salavatinsky gang.
“Of course, oil company employees colluding with the FSB, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and organized crime groups, security forces and bandits, whose names were mentioned today, are just a small layer. The trace of the “roof-makers” of oil thieves stretches to the very top, – Shmonin claimed. “According to various sources, the volume of stolen oil varies from 1 to 15% of the total oil production.”
According to his estimates, the total proceeds from the sale of stolen oil in Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug amounted to 2 billion rubles a month.
Most of the information for the report “Criminal Oil” was given to Shmonin by former employees of the private security company RN Okhrana Nizhnevartovsk – the former director of the private security company Valery Shirokov and his subordinates Alexander Vysochin and Igor Panishev, reported Radio Liberty. At the time of the preparation of the film, all of them were fired, because they could not work together with the security service of Samotlorneftegaz: they fought with tie-ins, wrote complaints to Moscow.
12 criminal cases
Immediately after the release of the report, the four heroes of the publications wrote statements of defamation, and in early 2017, the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug police opened a case against a group of extortionists. According to the investigators, it included Shmonin, his lawyer, the former head of the Nizhnevartovsk District Department of Internal Affairs, Colonel Zinchenko, and other persons. They allegedly extorted money from officials and deputies “under the threat of spreading information about them that discredits their honor and dignity.”
In particular, in February 2016, Shmonin, according to investigators, prepared an article “Deputy of Nefteyugansk – a killer and murderer?” and video material containing deliberately unreliable information about the commission of crimes by the former deputy of Nefteyugansk Evgeny Vostrikov. For refusing to publish, they demanded 3.5 million rubles from him. Vostrikov did not pay, and the article was published.
The prosecution also claimed that in December 2016, Shmonin published on the website Chinovnic.com a video with the participation of another victim, Vadim Nikandrov, a former deputy of the Nizhnevartovsk City Duma from the Liberal Democratic Party, who is engaged in oral sex on these frames. According to Shmonin, the video is the result of operational work, and he received it from Alexei Shipilov, an assistant to the governor of the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug Natalya Komarova, but did not post it on the Internet. Aleksei Shipilov denied that the video had been handed over during the investigation, and the judge refused to summon him to court, as did 28 other defense witnesses declared by Shmonin.
By data newspaper Neft, Shmonin published a video commissioned by “one of the sponsors interested in discrediting the political leaders of United Russia (in particular, the speaker of the regional parliament Boris Khokhrakov and the chairman of the Nizhnevartovsk Duma Maxim Klets)”. In the video, in addition to Nikandrov, there was a deputy from United Russia.
After the FSB became interested in Shmonin’s activities, another video leaked to the network. On it, Shmonin forced the disgraced deputy Nikandrov to slander politicians influential in the region. “The more you throw tinsel, the better,” Shmonin told Nikandrov on frames, published by the newspaper Neft, affiliated with the regional authorities.
Shmonin was detained in April 2017, and two months earlier, searches were carried out in the offices of the Chinovnik.ru portal and Shmonin’s blog, Yugra Public Television. Subsequently, the journalist said that about a month after his arrest, he was taken for interrogation in the Tyumen pre-trial detention center. He was interviewed by two men who introduced themselves as FSB officers from Moscow. They were interested in the customers of the article “Criminal Oil”.
“You have three options to get out of here: the first – feet first, the second – you take on all the charges, we release you on bail and you go abroad, the third – you talk about those who are behind you and get the status of a witness “, they said to Shmonin.
After refusing to name the customers, one of the FSB officers put a plastic bag on Shmonin’s head, and the second put a stun gun on his thigh. Having received an electric shock, Shmonin lost consciousness. When he woke up, he was shown a dynamo for electric torture and told to think about the future.
Returning to the cell, Shmonin wrote a complaint, but the next morning he was summoned by the head of the pre-trial detention center, who promised that the torture would not be repeated if he remained silent.
In March 2020, it became known that the investigation had lost a huge amount of physical evidence: hundreds of disks with archives, flash drives, phones seized during the search, which, according to the journalist, contained evidence of his innocence. Shmonin asked to hold the investigators accountable for the theft of material evidence, but he was refused a criminal case. True, some of the disks were later found, but the court failed to see their contents for technical reasons.
In total, 12 criminal cases were initiated against Shmonin, but only six were brought to trial, and the rest were dismissed for lack of evidence. The journalist was found guilty of slander (three episodes, parts 3 and 5 of article 128.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), violation of privacy (part 1 of article 137 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), as well as illegal distribution, public demonstration of pornographic materials (p. ” a”, “b” part 3 of article 242 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) and extortion on an especially large scale (paragraph “b” of part 3 of article 163 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation).
In June 2021, Shmonin was sent to the Novosibirsk SIZO-1. Then the employees of the Federal Penitentiary Service threatened him with murder, the lawyer of the convict filed complaints with the prosecutor’s office and the Investigative Committee. The complaint stated that Denis Raspevin, head of the detention center for security and operational work, “ordered” Shmonin to be placed in a “special cell” at number 4707. Upon entering the cell, Shmonin heard another prisoner in the cell shout that he would kill both the inmate and the guard on duty. Shmonin refused to enter and they began to beat him with fists, kicks, and also with an iron door grill.
Eduard Shmonin was born in the Sverdlovsk region. In the 1990s, he received two terms for burglaries. After his release, Shmonin first went into business with non-ferrous metals in the city of Nadym (KhMAO), and then decided to become a journalist.
Ekaterinburg acquaintances gave him an annual course “Advertising and PR”, and in the early 2000s, Shmonin created the magazine “Nadym”, which published laudatory articles about local enterprises and their leaders. Later, he created the magazines Surgut and Sever News. “I then realized that the task of a journalist is to be paid for not writing,” Shmonin said frankly, meaning that, in his opinion, a journalist should look for “compromising evidence” so that high-ranking officials pay him for saving this information is confidential.
In 2010, in the same Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug, Shmonin created the site “Chinovnik.ru”, and in 2015 “Public Television of Yugra”. For the first seven years, these media were allegedly sponsored by the governor of the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, Natalia Komarova. Shmonin’s working correspondence and his telephone conversations also testify that in 2016 one of the main sponsors of OT Yugra was Alexander Peterman, in different years a deputy of the Nizhnevartovsk Duma, president of the Slavtek group of companies, which invests in a variety of businesses – from the production of sausages to restaurants and radio stations. The name of Peterman was associated with criminal showdowns and organized crime groups of the 1990s – early 2000s. Peterman himself denied influence on the editorial policy of OT Ugra, although he confirmed that he had transferred money to Shmonin’s wife during his detention.
By the time Criminal Oil was released, Shmonin had quarreled with many influential people in the region, including Governor Natalya Komarova and her entourage, Radio Liberty noted.
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