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If Pichugin did not want to link himself to the Gorins' disappearance, then why phone at all? Who would have known that Gorin was planning to meet up with him? Peshkun was unlikely to have wanted to discuss this with the press. Unlike Dedova, he gave not a single interview.
Gorin and Menatep
What was the purpose of Gorin's planned meeting with Pichugin? According to the investigation, it was to further blackmail him. The two men could well have some financial issues to resolve after Gorin's alleged visit to Khodorkovskiy senior. And Gorin, according to this version of events, had for a long time been threatening to tell all about Pichugin. He wanted Pichugin to help him become director of the Yukos branch office in Tambov Region.
That was the question that Gorin was supposedly on his way to discuss. But Pichugin could not help him into a job with Yukos. After the murky end of the Algoritm escapade and the criminal case had fizzled out and left him unscathed, Gorin for a while was left without an occupation. Not long after he was recommended for the job of manager of a branch that Menatep Bank was opening in Tambov. Who recommended him? A mysterious figure in the Kumarin gang.
Pichugin had once been quite senior in the Tambov Region FSB, and he arrived in town to prepare for the branch opening. That was when "important people" recommended Gorin for branch manager.
Yukos's managers and its security personnel knew full well, of course, why the regional administration needed one of its own, a man of Gorin's ilk, in charge of the bank. But they had to go along with it: they were from out of town and needed to obtain a foothold on unfamiliar ground. It was a compromise. And it ended in scandal.
Gorin set about his new job with gusto. The bank rapidly received its licence and got a fine building for next to nothing. Then big money from the regional budget started flowing through the bank to fund state housing programmes. Several buildings in the town centre were demolished and in their place appeared not affordable homes but a prestige block of flats, where nearly all the region's top officials quickly installed themselves.
In other words, the officials were using Menatep to illegally finance building work. An audit carried out for Menatep's proprietors revealed fraud on a grand scale at the branch. They were not going to stand for that. Prosecutors got involved and Gorin again was in the thick of a scandal. Again he got off scot-free - he was simply fired from the bank, although his card was marked.
But no-one pursued Gorin, let alone killed him. In a region where violent revenge for the merest of sins was standard practice, Yukos's conduct seemed more than civilised. And Pichugin kept his job, so the company managers clearly thought he was not in on the scam.
Apparently the regional authorities did somehow manage to do a deal with the corporation: three of the four criminal cases on the Menatep frauds were closed. And, incidentally, in one of them Galina Dedova figured as a witness. She was then working as an economist in a company that was part of the lengthy chain through which the illicit money had been flowing. It could be that this old case was seized on by the prosecutors, after which she wrote her notorious letter to Khodorkovskiy, accusing Yukos of being behind the disappearance of her daughter and son-in-law.
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