Three “officials” to be tried in Moscow for looting the Azovelectrostal plant in Mariupol
Former high-ranking “officials” of the Donetsk “republic” will be tried in Moscow for looting as an organised criminal group. The “officials” are accused of stealing and selling the property of the Mariupol-based Azovelectrostal plant for scrap metal.
According to the Russian pro-Kremlin media outlet Kommersant, these are former “deputy prime minister–minister of industry and trade” Volodymyr Rushchak, his aide, former “mayor” of occupied Makiivka Serhiy Holoshchapov, and the head of the “state-owned” enterprise Vtormet Trading House Maxim Soldatov.
The article under which the three men will be charged provides for a prison sentence of 8 to 15 years for large-scale looting in wartime.
Kommersant noted that the article was introduced into the Russian criminal code in autumn 2022. The Russian newspaper also stressed that this is the first time that officials have been prosecuted under this article.
Earlier, media reported about the trial of Holoshchapov. The man was detained along with his alleged accomplice, director of the “state-owned” Donetsk Industrial Company Oleksiy Petrusenko, and several other people in December 2023.
In September 2024, Holoshchapov’s court session in the Holoshchapov case was held, at which he recanted his earlier guilty plea. According to Holoshchapov, he was in charge of demining the plant and tried to prevent its looting.
According to Kommersant, Russian investigators first detained Soldatov, and from him learned about the involvement of Rushchak and Holoshchapov. Kommersant did not mention Petrusenko, who has been accused of “abuse of power” but not looting.
The Azovelectrostal plant was part of the Azovmash machine-building concern and was declared bankrupt in 2016, according to 0629, a media outlet formerly based in Mariupol. The director of Azovelectrostal was Kostiantyn Ivashchenko, who became the head of the local occupation administration after the occupation of Mariupol in 2022.
0629 claims that Ivashchenko had been looting the plant’s property even before 2022, but he is not named among the looters and their accomplices who were detained.
From 2001 to 2015, Serhiy Holoshchapov was the production director at one of the enterprises in Makiivka near Donetsk, 0629 reported. In 2019, he became the “mayor” of the city. Occupied reported that he was first detained in 2021 on suspicion of “committing acts of corruption.”
It is unclear when and how he was released: in November 2023, the media mentioned him as an “adviser to the minister of industry and trade” of the Donetsk “republic.”
Reports of his second detention in 2023 referred to the removal, scrapping and sale of the plant’s workshops between January and June 2023. This means that Holoshchapov was supposed to be an “advisor to the minister” at least from the beginning of 2023.
In May 2024, Holoshchapov was “convicted” in Donetsk for large-scale bribery. The case of the embezzlement of Azovelectrostal was also initially investigated in Donetsk, but was transferred to Moscow by the decision of the first deputy head of the Russian Investigative Committee, Kommersant noted.
Until 2014, Volodymyr Rushchak headed the National Accreditation Agency of Ukraine, and later the Russian Federal Accreditation Service department in the Central Federal District. Rushchak became the “minister” in Donetsk in 2020, before that he was also a “deputy minister”.
Kommersant claimed that the Russians planned to demine the territory of Azovelectrostal and transfer it, along with other enterprises in Mariupol, to the Russian state corporation Rostec to resume operations.
At the same time, the media reported that the Ilyich Iron and Steel Works was also being looted in the city. People from the circle of the Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov are believed to be involved.
In particular, The Wall Street Journal, citing a resident, reported that trucks with rolled metal were still being taken out of the plant. The plant’s legal owner, Metinvest, also claimed that a $220 million production line had been dismantled and taken to Russia.
The WSJ noted that, according to the 52wmb customs database, Russian companies bought steel, coal and containers from the plant in 2022, and in 2023, metal from Ilyich Iron and Steel Works was exported to Uzbekistan.