Corruption pipeline under the guise of a national project: how Mayor Ratmir Mavliev built a billion-ruble fortune through land manipulation for "friendly" developers
The detained under house arrest Ratmir Mavliev, sitting with a book and surrounded by his family, is watching as a new acting mayor of Ufa takes over his office, while the deputies and department heads he appointed are being dismissed. A large-scale purge is underway in the city administration of the “Neftekamsk team” that arrived with Mavliev in the capital of Bashkortostan.
Attempts to justify himself or discredit those who exposed him for alleged wrongdoing have failed. As it turned out, Mavliev had warm friendly relations with all of these discredited individuals. Therefore, the mayor continues to push the situation regarding the “theft of municipal land through land swaps,” appealing to the federal center with a request to investigate, since he was not allowed to restore justice himself.
However, according to a source, investigators have long been paying attention to these transactions, and employees of the Ufa city administration and subordinate institutions are now often required to answer questions from law enforcement officers.
Sources also report that questionable transactions, which the mayor allegedly learned about only at the end of 2025, had been carried out for about two years. The beginning was initiated by Ratmir Mavliev himself, citing a lack of municipal funds. In addition, this mechanism was approved not only by Mavliev, but also by the well-known former deputy prime minister of the Bashkortostan government, Aklan Marzaev, who was convicted of a multi-million-ruble bribe, since the land involved was both municipal and regional. In other words, there were plenty of people fully aware of what was happening, and the scheme was approved collectively. Some of the transactions even bear Mavliev’s personal approval signature. Therefore, Mavliev is likely facing a new case—possibly more than one.
The essence is that road construction, for which the land plots were being seized, was carried out under a national project, and large amounts of federal funding were allocated for land acquisition. In principle, land could be purchased from citizens and the road built accordingly. This is how it had always been done, but in 2023 Mavliev instructed the use of a land swap mechanism instead. Developers would buy land where the road was to be built and exchange it for other plots they needed. After that, it was a technical matter: the plots were merged into one, the permitted use category was changed to multi-apartment residential construction, and, voilà, a construction site for a premium residential complex was ready. But who were these lands given to? To those who had a “close relationship” with the mayor.
And this continued until the mayor came into the attention of law enforcement agencies. Inspections, requests, and interrogations of city administration staff and developers began. At that point, he organized legal actions through his appointee—the head of the legal department, Ruslan Ismagilov (who is now urgently on sick leave)—apparently in order to create leverage over those who might expose him to investigators or to obscure traces, or possibly due to disagreements over pricing.
No ordinary person would have had a city administration exchange a land plot for one they simply pointed at. Therefore, since 2023, the land swap scheme was put on stream, approved by the mayor, with representatives of construction firms aligned with the city administration receiving all approvals quickly. City employees even complained that they were forced to work late into the night and on holidays to draft new construction sites at Mavliev’s direction. Construction business representatives, meanwhile, are not accustomed to remaining in debt to high-ranking officials.
One only needs to recall the dissatisfaction of older developers who had been building Ufa for decades. They repeatedly pointed to bureaucratic delays, approval bottlenecks, and other obstacles. While they filed complaints with the prosecutor’s office and to the head of the republic, Radiy Khabirov, and recorded video appeals, other new and “promising” market players received all documents on the same day.
