Moscow: Russia is investigating one of its most important spaceship builders amid a multi-million dollar corruption scandal that has engulfed the country’s troubled space industry.
Dmitry Dyakonov, general director of Ekopravo, which provides legal services to the company that builds Russia’s famous Proton and Angara space rockets, was arrested on Monday following accusations of misappropriation and embezzlement across the industry that could run into billions of dollars.
Dyakonov was placed under house arrest, a spokesman for Moscow’s Basmanny District court said. He is accused of providing the Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Centre, which produces spacecraft launch systems, including Proton and Angara rockets, with “incomplete” certificates and receipts for consulting services since 2007.
Proton rockets have suffered a series of expensive malfunctions in recent years. Dmitry Rogozin, the deputy prime minister overseeing reform of the sector, said last week that the Khrunichev Centre embezzled $182 million (Dh668 million) in 2014 alone.
Last week, the Russian defence ministry entered a claim for 1.8 billion roubles (Dh130 million) against the Khrunichev Centre at the Moscow commercial court. The reasons for the claim have not been made public. Rogozin, who is overseeing the conversion of the Russia’s space agency into a state corporation, has publicly blamed the Khrunichev Centre for the failure of Proton rockets.
“[Such] accidents are the result of a systemic crisis from which the state space agency has yet to emerge,” he wrote on Twitter after a crash. But the Khrunichev case is only the tip of an iceberg of allegations engulfing the sprawling space industry.
On Friday, the head of Russia’s national audit chamber accused Roscosmos, the state space agency, of mislaying nearly 92 billion roubles in 2014. In a report to parliament on Friday, Tatiana Galikova, the head of the chamber, told MPs that the violations at Roscosmos were so large that she initially “refused to believe her own accountants”.
Russia’s once-mighty space sector has been rocked by a series of accidents and allegations of corruption in recent months, including the loss of two expensive space probes and a scandal over unpaid wages at a new space centre.
