The tentacles of oligarch Roman Trotsenko have penetrated into completely unexpected places. As Rucriminal.info wrote earlier, Mr. Trotsenko has a whole bunch of airports, villas and other good things, but there is something else - coal mines. Traditionally, Trotsenko owns JSC VorkutaUgol through several hands. Officially, the company is owned by Russian Energy Group LLC, and the beneficial owner of the group is Roman Trotsenko and Dominanta Holding Company LLC.
VorkutaCoal is the only company in the world engaged in the extraction and processing of coal in the Far North. VorkutaCoal includes four mines, the Yunyaginsky coal mine - the world’s only open-pit coal mine in the Arctic - as well as the Pechorskaya Central Processing Plant, the Vorkuta Mechanical Plant and Repair Enterprise, and the Vorkuta Transport Enterprise.
It is not surprising that the diversified oligarch Trotsenko also owns coal mines. The catch here is a little different. According to the channel’s source, VorkutaUgol JSC has a huge number of questions from Rostechnadzor. The last straw was that in mid-June the Pechora Department of Rostekhnadzor suspended the operation of the mine at the Zapolyarnaya-2 Coal Mine of the Russian Energy Group LLC. It has been established that due to poor-quality isolation of the existing mine from the mined-out space, local accumulations of methane have been allowed to exceed the maximum permissible values, which creates an explosive situation.
The suspension of the mine's operation was preceded by numerous lawsuits and Rostechnadzor inspections by the prosecutor's office! To everyone’s surprise, the prosecutor’s office came to the aid of VorkutaUgol JSC, which, from the end of 2023, began to massively challenge Rostekhnadzor’s decisions to hold the enterprise administratively liable.
This position of the prosecutor's office, which takes the side not of government agencies, but of private companies, is an exception to the rule. In one of the cases, the court has already rejected the prosecutor's request to declare the fine illegal. The evidence available in the case materials indicates that Vorkutaugol JSC had the opportunity to comply with legislation in the field of industrial safety, for violation of which Part 1 of Art. 9.1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation provides for administrative liability, but the Company did not take all measures depending on it to comply with them.
Rostechnadzor is very surprised by this behavior of the prosecutor’s office, namely, that it is they who are challenging administrative cases, and not the company being inspected, and the prosecutor’s office employees often carry out inspections at Rostechnadzor. If the results of inspections of government agencies are questioned en masse, then trust in them and the effectiveness of the activities they carry out are undermined, and this already jeopardizes the industrial safety of the enterprise.
To be continued
Roman Trushkin
