On August 7, 2026, during the trial of former Teploenergo) Ilya Khalturin, his defense filed a motion to terminate the criminal prosecution for lack of corpus delicti. The document ran to about 200 pages.[3]

Substance of the charges

Khalturin has been charged with exceeding his official authority on four counts. The first concerns the change of design organization during the Nagornaya Heat Supply Plant: the subsidiary TER-NN terminated its contract with ASB Parsek LLC and signed a contract with TGV-Proektirovanie LLC.[1] The second count concerns a contract for relaying heating networks with Stroitelnye Tekhnologii LLC: the investigation considers it a violation that a sole supplier was chosen while the company's director Zoya Makarkina had an unspent conviction (a suspended sentence handed down in 2022), and that a penalty for delayed work was not collected.[2] The third and fourth counts concern doubling the salary of TER-NN director Yakov Girkin. According to the investigation, the raise was made, among other things, so that Girkin could pay for a lawyer in his own criminal case over exceeding his authority.[3]

The defense's position

Khalturin and his lawyers do not admit guilt. According to the motion, the delays by Stroitelnye Tekhnologii LLC in relaying the networks were explained by the workload of the state expert review, as well as by simultaneous work by gas and road services in the same areas.[1] As for director Zoya Makarkina's conviction, the former head of Teploenergo stated that he learned of it only in 2023 — when, because of sanctions, the company switched to sole-supplier contracts and Makarkina asked for payments to be transferred to the account of ST LLC, registered to her minor son, citing tax problems.[1] Khalturin explained the raise for Girkin as necessary to retain a manager who intended to quit because of the heavy workload — to avoid disrupting the reconstruction of the heat plant.[2]

Witness testimony

At a repeat interrogation in court, Yakov Girkin confirmed the complaints against Parsek: delays in preparing the design, entire sections of documentation missing, technical errors, and later the contractor's cutting off contact.[2] ASB Parsek director Alla Nemudrova presented a different version: the delays, she said, were caused by deliveries of experimental boilers, changes to the project parameters by the customer, and corrections being logged as remarks; she also noted that Teploenergo) tried to complete the design and construction in two years instead of the standard three, and that the reconstruction of the Nagornaya heat plant was carried out without a building permit.[2]

Shortly before the motion was filed, Yakov Girkin's own conviction in his case over exceeding authority, for which he had earlier received a suspended sentence of one and a half years, was expunged.[1]

Sources

  1. GiperNN — Defense asks to close the criminal case of ex-head of Nizhny Novgorod's Teploenergo (archive)
  2. NIA Nizhny Novgorod — Defense of ex-Teploenergo head Khalturin asked to terminate the criminal case (archive)
  3. Newsroom24 — Defense of ex-Teploenergo head Khalturin asked the court to close the criminal case (archive)
  4. Otkrytyi Nizhny — Defense of ex-Teploenergo head Khalturin asks to terminate the criminal case (archive)