St. Petersburg police said Friday that they arrested a senior manager at Gazprom Neft, one of Russia’s biggest oil producers, on suspicion of accepting bribes in his previous role at the company’s investment division.
Russia’s Interior Ministry said the senior manager received a motorboat and an apartment in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi valued at 30 million rubles ($387,800) in exchange for ensuring contract bids with Gazprom Invest and “general patronage” between 2021 and 2022.
“Preliminary investigations indicate that the suspect… repeatedly received illegal payments from executives of commercial organizations,” Interior Ministry spokeswoman Irina Volk said without identifying the senior manager by name.
The Interfax news agency, which broke the news of the arrest earlier in the day, reported that the senior manager was Gazprom Neft deputy chairman Anton Dzhalyabov.
Interfax said Dzhalyabov headed a branch of Gazprom Invest in the town of Nadym in the Yamalo-Nenets autonomous district before joining Gazprom Neft.
Dzhalyabov has worked at Gazprom for around 25 years, Russian media reported, and he replaced Vadim Yakovlev as deputy chairman of the board overseeing exploration and production at Gazprom Neft in April 2024.
Law enforcement authorities took Dzhalyabov to Moscow, where investigators plan to ask a judge to place him in pre-trial detention later on Friday.
The state-run TASS news agency, citing anonymous law enforcement sources, later reported that investigators have also charged two construction company executives with bribing Dzhalyabov in exchange for his signing off on work contracts that they had failed to complete.
