In Ufa, the head of the operator organisation of the "Russia — My History" Historical Park, city council deputy and well-known local businessman Iosif Marach has been detained. He is suspected of acting as an intermediary in bribery. Marach had previously been a witness in the criminal case against Ufa developer Rustem Saidashev. And Marach is not the only Ufa deputy to find himself facing criminal prosecution.
On 11 March 2026, a search was carried out at the home of Iosif Marach; the businessman himself was placed under a preventive measure in the form of a written undertaking not to leave. A criminal case has been opened against him on suspicion of acting as an intermediary in bribery (Part 4, Article 291.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). Marach himself declined to comment on the searches conducted at his home or on the charges brought against him.
"UFA1.RU" links Marach's detention to the case of the previously convicted head of the company "Standard Plus", Rustem Saidashev. In November 2025, the Ufa District Court of Bashkortostan sentenced the developer to ten years in a strict-regime penal colony and a fine of 100 million roubles for attempting to bribe a judge of the Republic's Arbitration Court. As the publication noted, "the intermediaries for the transfer of money were supposed to be Iosif Marach and former Ufa city council deputy Vadim Ramazanov, but they reported Saidashev's actions to the FSB directorate."
From the city — to the deputy
Iosif Marach has been a deputy of the Ufa City Council since 2005. The last time, in 2021, he was elected as an independent candidate in a single-mandate constituency.
From 2002 to 2017, the businessman was the general director of OOO "TK Tsentralny" (known to Ufa residents as the Central Market). From 2017, Marach became the strategic development director of OOO "Expo-Plaza", the predecessor of which was OOO "TK Tsentralny". This same company was linked to the exhibition complex on the grounds of the former VDNKh. The city council website also states that he heads the Autonomous Non-Commercial Organisation "Cultural and Educational Centre 'Art-Ufa'", which is a partner (effectively — the operator) of the "Russia — My History" Historical Park located in Ufa — one of Vladimir Medinsky's flagship projects (also situated on the territory of the former Ufa VDNKh).
No data on Iosif Marach's activities in the Ufa City Council, on draft decisions proposed by him, or on any significant speeches he made at sessions could be found in open sources. There is, however, a great deal of information about his business activity, which is directly linked to the Ufa mayor's office.
In the early 2000s, Marach acted as the liquidator of the Municipal Unitary Enterprise "Ufa Central Market", which belonged to the city committee for municipal property management, and himself became the head of OOO "TK Tsentralny", which privatised the property of the liquidated enterprise. OOO "TK Tsentralny" belonged to the firm "Finvestorg-Ufa", linked to entrepreneur Vasily Peganov. In 2019, the bankruptcy of "Tsentralny" began, linked to the businessman's debts to the "Trust" bank. The application to declare "TK 'Tsentralny'" bankrupt was filed by representatives of the "Bashkir Exhibition Company EXPO", located precisely on the Ufa VDNKh grounds.
From 2017, the businessmen tried to prove their right to purchase the land under the exhibition complex through the courts, with the tenant of the disputed plot being the company "Expo-Plaza", whose strategic development director was precisely Iosif Marach, and whose owner was the former head of the land and property relations department of the Ufa mayor's office, Mikhail Lazarenko.
In 2024, media reported that the Ufa mayor's office "managed to challenge a grandiose siphoning-off of city property, including the land of the Ufa VDNKh, by structures linked to businessmen Iosif Marach and Vasily Peganov." This concerned not only the return of the VDNKh complex to city ownership, but also the prospect of recovering land that Marach and Peganov had managed to carve out of it and sell to construction companies, including those linked to the family of Bashkortostan Prime Minister Andrei Nazarov.
In 2021, the anonymous Telegram channel "Secrets of Ufa Developers" reported that Iosif Marach "has set his sights on the territory of the former Chernikovka taxi depot." "At the moment, this plot belongs to Bashavtotrans, but part of the territory has already been sold to the company Ruderis, directly affiliated with Marach," the channel's authors asserted. According to their information, there was a de facto squeezing-out of organisations based on the plots remaining with Bashavtotrans — private security company employees were posted at the entrances, hindering normal operations, and tenants had their utilities cut off.
In other words, the arrested deputy's business method was fairly simple: using his connections in the city (and, possibly, regional) administration, he privatised far more expensive city property quite cheaply. The companies could then go bankrupt or simply run up debts to other legal entities, also linked to Marach and his partners, until the former city property gradually dissolved within these schemes.
Businessmen-deputies — defendants in criminal cases
Other cases of criminal proceedings being initiated against Ufa businessmen-deputies are also known.
In March 2024, it was reported that city council deputy and general director of OOO SZ "Agidel-Investstroy" Filyus Ishbulatov (elected on the United Russia list, a member of the party faction in the city council) had been detained, suspected of giving a bribe to an official (Part 2, Article 291 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation).
In April 2024, media reported on the arrest of businessman-deputy Artur Khazigaleev (independent, did not belong to any faction in the city council). According to the investigation, the head of the "Bashspirt" trading house, Alexander Kompanchenko, and the ex-director of AO "Bashspirt" and former mayor of Ufa, Rauf Nugumanov, sold buildings belonging to the trading house in 2021–2022 to the companies "Atlantis" and "Citadel", affiliated with Artur Khazigaleev. The deal, in the investigation's view, was concluded at an undervalued price — for 132 million roubles, with a market value of the property of 200 million roubles.
In March 2025, the Kirovsky District Court of Ufa found Artur Khazigaleev guilty of causing damage to a company through deception or abuse of trust (Paragraphs "a", "b", Part 2, Article 165 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) and sentenced him to four years of deprivation of liberty, suspended. In July of the same year, the Supreme Court of Bashkortostan reduced this term to three years and nine months. Khazigaleev's deputy powers were terminated early on 14 July 2025.
In August 2024, it became known that the Sovetsky District Court of Ufa had found city council deputy and former head of BPO "Progress" Marat Timirov (elected on the United Russia list, a member of the party faction in the city council) guilty of illegal trafficking of special technical means for covert information gathering (Article 138.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), embezzlement (Part 4, Article 160 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) and illegal creation of a legal entity (Part 2, Article 173.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) and sentenced him to four years of deprivation of liberty, suspended, and a fine of 300,000 roubles. Timirov's deputy powers were terminated early on 13 August 2024.
"These deputies, in my view, did not represent the interests of city residents in any way"
The elections to the Ufa City Council of the fifth convocation took place on 19 September 2021.
According to the City Charter, the Council consists of 36 deputies: the United Russia deputy association includes 26 deputies, while the LDPR and CPRF associations have three deputies each. Another three deputies — the aforementioned Iosif Marach, director of OOO "Management Company 'Tselevoy Kapital'" Alexander Degtev, and general director of OOO "TEKSTRO" Ildar Faizrakhmanov — do not belong to any deputy associations.
Analysing the deputy corps elected in 2021, media noted that "the city parliament has not rid itself of the industrial-construction lobby" and that "it is too early to speak of getting rid of the oligarchate in the Ufa City Council."
One Ufa civic activist, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, stated that the majority of deputies elected in 2021 represented big business or were somehow affiliated with it.
— These deputies, in my view, did not represent the interests of city residents in any way — they merely lobbied for their own business projects, — the activist noted. — And I believe we have not managed to rid ourselves of the dominance of developers at all. It was this very composition of the city council that adopted the city "Land Use and Development Rules" back in 2022, in which the city prosecutor's office at the end of last year identified both violations of a corruptogenic nature and discrepancies with the federal Urban Planning Code, and submitted a recommendation to amend these rules. City residents have been extremely dissatisfied all this time with the way the construction of apartment blocks and residential complexes is taking place on the territory of Ufa. And it is not infrequently the construction firms belonging to deputies that find themselves at the centre of scandals linked, for example, to "infill" development.
The activist also stated that he sees no "positive role whatsoever for the current deputy corps in the life of the city."
— Its decisions have done more harm to city residents, or have done nothing to help resolve the city's numerous problems. I have not noticed, for example, that the deputies have in any way defended the interests of residents in the urban planning sphere, or in the housing and utilities sector, where district housing management authorities have gone bankrupt over the past five years. I have seen no role for the deputies in the reform of public transport, the operation of which draws a mass of complaints from residents, nor in building normal urban infrastructure. The list could go on endlessly. There are a mass of problems in the city, they only increase with each passing year, but the deputies, preoccupied only with lobbying their own business interests, are not solving them in any way.
The elections of deputies to the Council of the "City of Ufa" Urban District of the sixth convocation will take place on 20 September 2026.