Former Deputy Minister of Education and former Vice President of Sberbank Marina Rakova confessed. This was stated by her lawyer at a court hearing, Interfax reports . Thus, all defendants in the case of embezzlement of more than 50 million rubles from the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences (Shaninka) pleaded guilty.
Rakova wrote a confession and expressed her readiness to compensate for the damage. The defense and the defendant herself ask to be transferred from the pre-trial detention center to house arrest. She is suspected of lobbying in 2019 for the allocation of funds from the budget to the Foundation for New Forms of Education Development, in which she was the CEO. The money was intended for government contracts under the federal project "Teacher of the Future". Examinations revealed signs of falsification in the reports on two "scientific studies".
On August 3, Rector Shaninka and 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. He was released from the pre-trial detention center under house arrest. The investigator claims that Zuev gave "damaging testimonies" against other defendants in the case and accomplices, about whom the investigation was not previously aware.
Before that, the rector of the RANEPA Vladimir Mau, whose case is connected with the cases of Rakova and Zuev, was replaced with a measure of restraint from house arrest to a written undertaking not to leave. 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.