The rector of the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences (Shaninka) and the director of the Institute of Social Sciences of the RANEPA, Sergey Zuev, “pleaded guilty to a particularly large-scale fraud” and compensated for the damage of about 15 million rubles. This was stated by an investigator in the Tverskoy Court of Moscow, Interfax reports .
The investigator also said that Zuev gave "damaging testimony" against other defendants in the case and accomplices, about whom the investigation was not previously aware.
The rector's lawyer, Dmitry Kravchenko, claims that Zuev's testimony did not consist in recognizing embezzlement of money: “Formally, this is a confession, but he did not admit that he embezzled money for himself. Zuev gave testimony that contributed to the investigation of the case, and also compensated for the damage in the amount of more than 15 million rubles.
Earlier, TASS, citing a source, reported that the Ministry of Internal Affairs asked the Tverskoy Court of Moscow to transfer Zuev from the pre-trial detention center to house arrest.
Earlier, the rector of the RANEPA Vladimir Mau, whose case is connected with the cases of ex-deputy minister of education Marina Rakova and rector Shaninka Sergey Zuev, was replaced with a measure of restraint from house arrest to a written undertaking not to leave the country. On July 22, the Tverskoy Court of Moscow sent Ivan Fedotov, Vice-Rector of the RANEPA, under house arrest; he is involved in the same case as Mau. They are accused of fraud with money from the budget allocated for the development of education.
According to The Insider columnist Boris Grozovsky, the arrest of the RANEPA rector showed that even a mild opposition is now unacceptable for the Kremlin. Read more about this in the material Malignancy. Boris Grozovsky on how and why the Kremlin cracked down on Russian universities .