Scandal-Hit Store Listed Ghost Firms As Suppliers

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: October 10, 2012 (Issue # 1730)

The city’s controversial Narodny supermarket listed several phantom firms as its official food suppliers, according to inspectors for St. Petersburg’s Russian Consumer Watch (Rospotrebnadzor).

Rospotrebnadzor investigated a number of Narodny’s suppliers, including Telsi, Orkhideya, Geostar and Interform, according to the watchdog’s press service, Interfax reported.

“During the administrative investigation it was found that at the addresses where those companies were registered, there were residential properties and no legal representatives. Those facts clearly confirm the conclusions of Rospotrebnadzor about the abuse of the law by a group of legal entities, as a result of which investigational procedures are now underway,” the press service said.

“According to legislation, the supply of foodstuffs from unknown sources poses a potential hazard to the lives and health of the population,” Rospotrebnadzor said.

On Sept. 28, the court temporarily suspended the operations of Narodny supermarket for 60 days.

Located on Prospekt Kosygina in the city’s northeast, Narodny is a low-price supermarket whose activities have often come under scrutiny by the city prosecutor’s office. Members of the Khryushi Protiv (“Piggies Against”) group — founded by the pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi — who proclaim their mission as a campaign against poor-quality products in food stores, performed several “quality-control raids” on the supermarket and reported their conclusions to President Vladimir Putin when they met him at the Seliger youth camp in the Tverskaya Oblast this summer.

Attempts to curtail the illegal activities of the store were for a long time unsuccessful because the owner of the commercial premises repeatedly changed the names of the legal entities renting the supermarket space.