A guilty verdict has been delivered in Turkestan in a case concerning the embezzlement of budget funds allocated for subsidising the wages of employed citizens.
According to the press service of the Agency for Financial Monitoring (AFM), the former director of the State Public Enterprise "Centre for Labour Mobility", an employee of the "Employer Support" department, and the heads of several commercial organisations orchestrated a scheme to illegally obtain state subsidies through fictitious employment.
The centre employee, having gained access to the electronic digital signatures of entrepreneurs, submitted applications to participate in employment programmes, listing non-existent positions in them.
After the applications were approved, orders for hiring citizens were issued. The entrepreneurs recruited acquaintances and relatives, whom they offered to open bank accounts for the supposed payment of contributions, but the accounts were used to siphon off the subsidies. Knowingly false timesheets were entered into the system each month.
The funds transferred by the state were cashed out by the entrepreneurs and handed over to the department employee, who distributed the money among the participants in the scheme.
It is reported that as a result, 78 people were fictitiously employed, and the damage to the state exceeded 49 million tenge.
The court sentenced three defendants to terms of imprisonment ranging from four and a half to five years. Two entrepreneurs were given sentences of restricted liberty for four and a half years. The damage to the state was compensated in full.
Earlier, it was reported that a court in the Turkestan region had handed down a sentence to employees of the district veterinary service and residents of one of the rural settlements. They were found guilty of embezzling state subsidies for the development of livestock farming.
It was reported that they illegally entered information into the system regarding nearly 100,000 heads of small cattle, which in fact did not exist. On the basis of the fabricated data, they received 271 million tenge in subsidies and distributed the money among themselves.