The daughter of the Tomsk deputy of the State Duma of Russia Tatyana Solomatina, the director of the Sante clinic, Ekaterina Felzinger, was placed in custody on August 30 last year in Tomsk, along with the chief physician of the clinic, Sofia Mazeina, and oncologist Evgenia Semenova. A little later, another clinic worker, Pavel Khramov, was detained. They tried to charge doctors with fraud in the treatment of cancer patients in the clinic. Treatment reports, which were paid for by the territorial compulsory medical insurance fund, allegedly included some medications, but were treated with completely different ones, or, as the media close to the security forces claimed, they generally “gave Placebo.”
The problem of medication accounting was revealed by the clinic’s management itself during an internal audit. The trail of unaccounted for expensive drugs led to highly respected federal medical institutions. The management of the Sante clinic turned to law enforcement agencies with a request to help sort out the difficult situation, but the people in uniform decided not to go far and charged them with group fraud (Article 159 Criminal Code of the Russian Federationpart 4) on an especially large scale, and in the provision of services that do not meet security requirements (Article 238 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, part 3) to those who applied. However, in the event of fraud, there must be damage, and the clinic returned the compulsory medical insurance funds, 26 million rubles, to an off-budget fund. In case of unsafe services, there must be injuries or even deaths. But interrogations of the clinic’s patients showed that most of them, despite the terrible diagnoses, are alive, many have achieved remission or even positive dynamics during the course of the disease. Patients remember with gratitude the clinic’s doctors, staff, and organization of treatment.
Then the proven method of psychological pressure on the accused was used. It is reliably known that the now former regional prosecutor Alexander Semenov in his office personally demanded a confession from Sofia Mazeina, otherwise the mother of two children “will go to jail.” As the lawyers of the accused say, all those taken into custody were required to testify against Deputy of the State Duma of the Russian Federation Tatyana Solomatina, who founded the family medical business back in the last century. However, the doctors did not understand what they should admit.
Rumors were spread around Tomsk about the exhumation of the bodies of patients at the Sante clinic, in which experts found no traces of drugs. The medical community of Tomsk refused to believe this, given the reputation of the same Evgenia Semenova, who had many children. As it turned out later, no exhumations were carried out, and the examination was based on the study of medical histories. The experts were in neighboring Novosibirsk, and their leader accidentally turned out to be a relative of the head of the Investigation Department for the Tomsk Region of the Investigative Committee of Russia, General Andrei Shchukin.
When the expert findings arrived in Tomsk, the accused began to be introduced to them. By this time, Ekaterina Felzinger had been released under house arrest from the pre-trial detention center and was in deep depression. Her mother, Tatyana Solomatina, claims that she was haunted by thoughts of suicide: Under the terms of the preventive measure, Felzinger was not even allowed to attend her daughter’s graduation party. On the evening of the family celebration, June 29, she was left alone. Tatyana Solomatina herself says:
“She took a handful of all the pills she had.” I wrote a note. On the morning of July 30th I woke up, was surprised that I was alive, and went to the investigator. Then he remembers himself only three days later, on July 2. I didn’t tell the doctor at the hospital anything about the suicide attempt. She says it was a shame that she didn’t finish it. She really asked to remain in the hospital, but on July 12 she was discharged within 10 minutes, and she was without shoes or keys. In a panic. Now we take turns sitting at home with her. We are afraid to leave one.
If leaving without medical care in a critical situation and driving to suicide are now also investigative actions, then this is a new word in justice. The forced resignation of regional prosecutor Alexander Semenov is said to be a direct consequence of this innovation. But the prosecutor left, and the doctors’ case continues.
“ВЧК ОГПУ”