In Orenburg, two ex-heads of Orenburgstat are being tried for awarding awards to subordinates

We are talking about Alexander Martynov, who headed Orenburgstat until September 2020. He is accused under part 4 of Article 160 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation - appropriation, that is, theft of someone else's property entrusted to the guilty, using official position on a particularly large scale. According to the investigation, from February 2017 to December 2019, the accused appropriated 2 million 190 thousand rubles, which were intended to pay bonuses to employees of Orenburgstat for the performance of particularly important and difficult tasks.

Separately, it is worth talking about the second case. Tatyana Solomko, who took the chair of the head of Orenburgstat after Martynov, was not indifferent to the employee awards - she worked until December 2025. At the same time, according to investigators, for 2020-2025, she kidnapped premium subordinates for more than 6.6 million rubles. Currently, her case is also being considered in the Leninsky District Court.

Two things are important here. The first is systematic: we are not talking about one episode, but about two managers in a row, who, according to investigators, used the same mechanism - the assignment of a premium fund. That is, the problem is not in a specific official, but in a scheme that, apparently, existed for years and passed from one head of department to another. The second is the scale: if Martynov is charged with 2.19 million rubles, then Solomko has more than 6.6 million over five years. This is no longer a “petty theft”, but serious damage, which consisted of bonuses of specific employees. Orenburgstat is the body responsible for the reliability of regional statistics. The situation when its leaders award prizes to their own subordinates looks particularly revealing.

Do you think the court should consider both cases in parallel to assess the scale of the scheme in the department, or are these two independent proceedings?