Throughout the modern history of Russia, the road industry has been the most lucrative morsel for both builders and officials. For example, in July 2024, 13 trillion rubles were allocated in the federal budget for the repair of Russian roads. Huge amounts of funding generate no less enormous interest among corruption groups, which consist of representatives of the government and commerce.
As the VChK-OGPU and Rucriminal.info telegram channel found out, the founder of one of these groups was Alexey Borisov, who until November 2024 headed many subdivisions of Avtodor, reaching the seat of deputy general director of the Ministry of Transport's Department of Internal Affairs, where he was detained by security forces. Naturally, for a bribe. Borisov was precisely the "representative of the authorities", while the "representative of commerce" was the Ivanovo oligarchs - the Feroyanov family, which owned a road construction empire.
The group's scheme of work is extremely simple: Borisov lobbied for the promotion of Avtodor people to the regions, who occupied key positions in the governments and regional divisions of Avtodor. Then, through these appointed persons, Borisov legally "correctly" promoted Feroyanov's structures to these regions, which mastered all the major road contracts. The amount of the "kickback" from the Feroyanovs was 5-10% depending on the object and the final cost.
In April 2017, Alexander Dronov became exactly such a protégé of Borisov in the Novgorod Region, replacing the office of the director of the Federal State Institution "Interregional Directorate for Road Construction in the Central Region of Russia of the Federal Road Agency", where Borisov himself had previously sat, with the office of the deputy governor of the region. Of course, the road industry fell under his supervision. In order to gain complete power over Novgorod roads, Dronov pulls several people out of the Avtodor structures at once - Dmitry Klimov, putting him in charge of Novgorodavtodor, and Stanislav Shultsev - the head of the department of transport and road facilities. From this time on, a "golden skating rink" begins to operate in the Novgorod region. All the characters in this article can easily be found on the official website of Rosavtodor here. According to the VChK-OGPU, the trio begins to fully use the legislative filter, allowing road workers from other regions to be included in the bidding for state orders - all regional contracts become "billion" (about a billion in size by consolidating lots, the cost must be more than 800 million rubles), the requirements for the contractor are written exclusively for Ferojanovsky companies. As a result, the road construction sphere in the region is divided between Soyuz Avtodor LLC (a Feroyan organization from Ivanovo, in February 2024, Gadzhi Feroyan appears as a founder) and SMU-Dondorstroy JSC (an office controlled by Borisov, which has direct ties to the Feroyans).
In 2018, on Dronov's initiative, Shultsev becomes the Minister of Transport of the Novgorod Region, and a year later - Deputy Governor. Having strengthened the government bloc, all supervisory bodies in the road construction sphere come under the control of the Dronovsky clan, which makes it easy to continue to hand over disgustingly executed projects and even put pressure on the judicial system.
Later, Dronov makes a replacement in Novgorodavtodor: he removes Klimov and in 2020 puts in his place a more loyal person - Konstantin Kuranov, who by 2022 becomes the Minister of Transport of the Novgorod Region. Dronov drags in Sergei Kokhanovsky from the Ural sector of Rosavtodor to fill the vacant seat. The money-cutting continued quite successfully until 2024. Over the course of seven years, Dronov formed an exclusive monopoly in the road sector, as well as a team of loyal associates from Rosavtodor, raised to high positions. Organizations controlled by Borisov successfully won all road auctions, for which he generously thanked Dronov. According to a source of the VChK-OGPU, the kickback from state contracts looked like this: the Feroyans transferred a percentage (as previously stated - from 5 to 10%) to Borisov, Borisov transferred a percentage of the percentage to Dronov, and he then distributed the money between the above-mentioned heroes. It happened that the Feroyans directly paid Novgorod residents. Considering that the annual budgets of the road fund in the Novgorod region amount to billions of rubles, even 1% of this amount is very significant money. For example, in 2025, the volume of the road fund in the region is 11.3 billion rubles, 1% is 113 million rubles, and 10% is already 1.13 billion rubles.
Local online newspapers have repeatedly written materials about the scale of corruption in the road sector of the Novgorod region (here, here, here, here, here, here, here and many other places). Some of them were even tried to be sued on the orders of Dronov. However, why the security forces did nothing for so long remains a mystery.
To give credit to Dronov, thanks to his desire to pocket as much money as possible, federal money was massively poured into the regional road sector, which made it possible to receive tback when the Governor of the Novgorod Region Andrei Nikitin was awarded the Golden Skating Rink award, which later became a symbol of corruption in this area.
The ice broke only in the second half of 2024. In November, Alexei Borisov was arrested, thereby cutting off the head of the road hydra, after which a series of arrests began in many regions of the country. In January 2025, the Feroyanov brothers were arrested for bribing Borisov. Novgorod officials were no exception. In April 2025, Dmitry Klimov and three of his colleagues were arrested. In July 2025, Deputy Governor Stanislav Shultsev, Transport Minister Konstantin Kuranov, and the head of Novgorodavtodor Sergei Kokhanovsky were jailed.
Meanwhile, even before the arrest of Novgorod officials in March 2025, Dronov was appointed acting governor of the Novgorod Region and immediately prepared for the upcoming elections in September of this year. Despite the lack of real competitors (all candidates are "technical"), the PR campaign is very difficult for political strategists.
Firstly, local media have repeatedly written about Dronov in connection with his very expensive property. For example, the presence of a house with an area of 777 square meters in the elite settlement "Imperial" on Kievskoye Highway, to which in 2018 a guest "house" of 111 square meters was added. Or the strange inclusion of children in the income certificate, which is not clear from whom and how it appeared. That is, the level of wealth for the sovereign's person is very contradictory.
Secondly, Dronov's relationship with women. Since the beginning of the election campaign, Dronov has been trying to convince everyone that he has a wife Elena and they have four children. They even created a separate page in Wikipedia for this. But Dronov is divorced. He has two children from his first marriage. And two more from his common-law wife Elena Tarasova. Not his wife, but his common-law wife, who, among other things, worked from 2017 to 2019 at New Technologies LLC, which is the executor of 4 state contracts with Novgorodavtodor for about 400 million rubles. The other day, local media showed Dronov with his "family". You just have to look at his facial expression when he addresses his "wife" and everything will become clear. Why he does not formalize the relationship with his new passion is quite understandable for a person who has devoted his whole life to corruption. And because of this, Dronov's PR people have a huge headache - how to tell about the candidate for governor that he is a good family man, although he does not have a family. Another problem is that one of Dronov's main PR people is his mistress, with whom they have been "together" for more than a year. Thirdly, before coming to Novgorod Oblast, Dronov was fired from his position as head of the Regional State Institution "Kostromaavtodor" with a bang for "the unsatisfactory condition of the roads and the discrepancy between the reports provided and the actual state of affairs." This was in 2011. Then, the governor of Kostroma Oblast fired Dronov live on air for outright deception, but in fact - for signing and paying for forged certificates of work performed by OOO "Masterstroy-Povolzhye" in the amount of more than 7 million rubles. A very negative review of a potential governor of Novgorod Oblast, isn't it? Fourthly, the July detention of Shultsev, Kuranov and Kokhanovsky, which, in fact, hits Dronov squarely in the forehead. All Novgorod media either said nothing about this, or quickly purged all the released materials. Novgorodians are now asking a very logical question: if three of Dronov's subordinates were arrested for the cases he organized and for which he received huge amounts of money, then why is Dronov himself still at large? Plus, everyone knows about the arrest of Borisov, who organized this corruption scheme. Representatives of the Novgorod "Yabloko" are quite convincingly demanding Dronov's resignation, having completely guessed the reasons and consequences of the arrest of three Novgorod road workers.
One can only guess whether the residents of the Novgorod region will again have to live under the rule of thieves and criminals, as it was during the time of "Novgorod Chicago", or will justice prevail?
Arseny Dronov
To be continued
Source: www.rucriminal.info
