Press Release, 28.04.2020

At the end of the summer of 2019, managers and psychologists, posing as professional lawyers, opened a spacious bright office in one of the central shopping centres in Omsk. A colorful sign with a phone number advertised allegedly high professionalism of the specialists of this firm. Relying on the trust of citizens, the office gave people to sign contracts and acts of work, although nothing was done in fact. Citizens lost their money, nerves and time.

“Increasingly more fraudulent schemes emerge every day. Seems that we have not learned a lesson from loud cases of previous Ponti schemes. This time the deceived and oppressed were the people who had been somehow offended by the authorities, who found themselves in a difficult situation. Residents of Omsk, believing in salvation from the legal side, turned to the “lawyers”. But here, too, they were deceived,” Andrei Zenkov, lawyer of the Omsk branch of Yabloko, notes.

“The victims of the actions of the pseudo-lawyers, among whom were elderly people, turned to the Omsk branch of Yabloko for help. According to the applicants, there were several dozen people who had been deceived, in total of several million roubles were stolen from them, and the company that took the money was no longer at the address, they disappeared without providing any services, although everything on the paper everything was swept under the carpet. I have already recieved several victims and intend to get a criminal case initiated,” Andrei Zenkov adds.

It should be noted that the Omsk branch of Yabloko opened a public reception providing free legal advice to residents of the city.