In Moscow, a court arrested in absentia the head of a large IT company, Parmalogica LLC, Evgeniy Ovcharov. The businessman, who fled the investigation and was put on the wanted list, is accused of particularly large-scale theft of budget funds. Moreover, the injured party in the case is the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office. Parmalogica has often acted as a developer of software and digital transformation for government agencies. One of the customers was the supervisory agency, which, however, lost almost 1 billion rubles. allocated funds, turning first to arbitration, and then to investigative authorities.
The decision to select a preventive measure in the form of detention for the founder of Parmalogica in absentia was made on Thursday, May 7, by the judge of the Meshchansky District Court, Oksana Goryunova. Thus, the petition of investigators from the Investigation Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, who are investigating a criminal case of fraud on an especially large scale (Part 4 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), was granted. In court, representatives of the investigation clarified that the accused fled, presumably abroad, and was put on the international wanted list.
“In relation to Evgeniy Borisovich Ovcharov, a preventive measure was chosen in the form of detention for a period of two months from the moment of his transfer to law enforcement agencies of the Russian Federation in the event of extradition or deportation to the territory of the Russian Federation, or from the moment of his actual detention on the territory of the Russian Federation,” the press service of the Moscow City Court told Kommersant.
It also clarified that Mr. Ovcharov “and other unidentified persons” are accused of theft of budget funds in the amount of over 800 million rubles, “allocated to the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation for the development of departmental software.”
Evgeny Ovcharov is one of the old-timers of the Russian IT industry, including in the field of software development for various government agencies. Since 1998, he worked at the Perm IT company “Prognoz” in the field of business analytics and custom software. This joint-stock company, among other things, worked closely with both federal and regional authorities. Among the customers of Forecast’s services were the administrations of the President and Government of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Economy, the largest banks and companies with state participation. However, in the middle of the last decade, the enterprise began to have serious problems.
In 2017, at the request of two government customers from the Tyumen region and the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), the company was included in the register of unscrupulous suppliers. In the same year, Prognoz was declared bankrupt with the total amount of creditors’ claims exceeding 2.7 billion rubles.
A year earlier, Evgeny Ovcharov left the company from the post of first deputy general director. According to some reports, about 200 employees followed him. The businessman created Parma Technologies Group, which positioned itself as “a developer and provider of solutions for the digital transformation of government and commercial organizations.” The team of specialists included, according to the company itself, about 600 employees – “architects, analysts, developers.”
The backbone of Parma Technologies Group was Parmalogica LLC, registered in Moscow, which later changed its “registration” to Perm. This company, in particular, as Kommersant reported, developed the Klastrum program – a functional module for collecting, processing, analyzing and visualizing large amounts of data, as well as the Unigate centralized access rights management system. In addition, Mr. Ovcharov appeared in various capacities in IT Parma LLC, TG Parma LLC, Kama Technologies LLC, etc. Parma Technologies Group’s revenue in 2024 amounted to 1.2 billion rubles, net profit – 200 million rubles. However, then Parmalogica began to have serious problems, including due to litigation. Revenue fell sharply, the number of employees was reduced from several hundred to a few people, and in the spring of 2025 bankruptcy proceedings were initiated.
It is possible that the collapse of the IT company, which at one time was one of the top 5 Russian companies in this field, was influenced by the conflict with the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Back in December 2021, as Kommersant told, the supervisory agency and another company filed a claim for 914 million rubles with the Moscow Arbitration Court. The essence of the claims remained unknown, since already at the second meeting the plaintiffs insisted on holding the hearings behind closed doors. In December 2024, after a series of examinations, the claim was fully satisfied, and the decision was confirmed in higher courts. According to preliminary data, the criminal case of fraud was a direct continuation of the story of the arbitration proceedings, and in both cases it was about software as part of the digitalization of the supervisory department. As part of the investigation, the Prosecutor General’s Office has allegedly already been recognized as the injured party, and the police are now actively searching for Evgeniy Ovcharov, who allegedly fled abroad, and is identifying the remaining participants in the scam.
