Russia's Prosecutor General's Office is seeking the transfer to state ownership of assets belonging to Vyacheslav Zakharov, a former deputy head of St. Petersburg's state construction supervision and expert review service, along with members of his family and associated individuals. According to Kommersant, which examined the anti-corruption lawsuit, the total value of assets prosecutors link to the defendants exceeds 1.5 billion rubles.
The lawsuit was filed in St. Petersburg's Primorsky District Court. According to documents described by the newspaper, Zakharov worked in municipal construction oversight bodies for more than two decades and left government service in 2024. The grounds for his dismissal were subsequently changed through a court proceeding to loss of trust.
Prosecutors allege that, despite restrictions on public officials, Zakharov was effectively involved in the operations of the construction company Mega-Stroy and Real-Yachting, a leisure services firm. According to the prosecutors' account, company stakes and other assets were registered to relatives and trusted associates to conceal his business involvement.
Documents described by Kommersant mention numerous land plots, residential properties on the shores of the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga, and a 17-story nonresidential building on Bestuzhevskaya Street in St. Petersburg with an assessed cadastral value of approximately 924 million rubles. The Prosecutor General's Office puts the defendants' combined declared income at 84 million rubles and argues that the scale of their property acquisitions is inconsistent with those earnings.
Prosecutors are asking the court to freeze the assets and subsequently transfer them to the state. Allegations of concealed business ownership and the origins of the property are grounds advanced in the lawsuit; no court decision granting those requests had been reported at the time of publication.