Despite the really serious secrecy of the operational and search units of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, this police service periodically gets into scandalous chronicles - its employees are trying to illegally make money on the side by what they have been taught.
What do they do
The secret administration of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and its structural subdivisions (they are available in all regions of Russia) have a long history - the so-called "tramps", they are spies, and in fact outside observers, were on the staff of the tsarist police. The current operational search bureau of the Ministry of Internal Affairs is called "seven" in the old fashioned way - it became the successor of the Soviet 7th Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR, which oversaw the external surveillance service.
The functions and tasks of the OPB employees are known in general terms, because the officials of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, for obvious reasons, prefer not to dwell on this topic. According to the adviser to the director of the Russian Guard, Alexander Khinshtein, even the police units of the OSB do not have the right to interfere with the "outdoor" service, it is so closed. They say that these officers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs are classified so that most of their colleagues do not know about their existence. Obshniks are not given service certificates, weapons, and often they are generally registered in "left" civilian positions. The duties of the "outsider" include spying on both police officers and civilians, collecting information about him using all available databases, and, if necessary, keeping a hidden photo-video recording.
OPB scandals
Two years ago, on the Internet portal LifeNews, it was reported about the arrest of an officer of the Moscow headquarters of the OPB, who was taken by officers of the police of its own security and the FSB red-handed - the outsider promised the businessman under investigation to "resolve the issue" of closing the case for a certain bribe (13 million rubles). Together with this major, his accomplice was detained.
Promotional video:
"Life News" wrote that before the employees of the secret unit were not convicted of committing such crimes. But this was far from the case - in 2002 in Voronezh, FSB operatives detained an even larger fish of the OPB - the deputy head of this unit of the city administration of the Ministry of Internal Affairs - he was selling secret information from a departmental database to criminals.
However, the loudest scandal in the OPB was the story, after which the head of this service, Colonel-General Balbashov, and more than 10 representatives of the police generals were fired.
Illegally infiltrated privacy
As A. Khinshtein wrote in his investigation, published in MK in the summer of 2010, the organized criminal group, detained then by FSB operatives, included 16 officers of the operational search bureau, former and retired (half and half). The criminal group was detained by the Chekists in one of the districts of the capital in early February of the same year. Former and current police officers were accused of illegal penetration into the privacy of citizens.
According to operational data, a certain businessman ordered the "outsiders" to spy and wiretap the phones of a Muscovite. It all cost a merchant more than a million rubles (all this action was carried out under the control of the Chekists, the money transferred was marked with a special staff). The "outsiders" followed the beloved of the rich man, while FSB officers were watching over them. In the process of observation, secret police databases were involved, the criminals used walkie-talkies, office special equipment, they accumulated and systematized the collected data in several laptops.
The incident revealed numerous violations in the organization of the activities of the OPB unit, which allowed the criminal group to operate and provoked a large departmental scandal.
As Izvestia later reported, at the stage of the trial, the charges were dropped from 12 accused, since the object of the surveillance, the very love of the oligarch, having officially forgiven most of the outsiders, reconciled with them. As a result, only two defendants were found guilty of intrusion into privacy. Yes, and they did not go to prison for what they had done - while the preliminary and judicial investigation was underway, the statute of limitations expired on their crime.
Nikolay Syromyatnikov