Parents sue tycoon’s firm over dysentery outbreak in Moscow

MOSCOW (AP) — Natalya Konkova got a call from her 5-year-old son’s day care center at School No. 1357, asking her to pick up Yaroslav because he was running a fever and having trouble walking.

He got worse over the next 24 hours, with severe diarrhea and vomiting, before an ambulance took him to a hospital. He was eventually diagnosed with dysentery.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before. It was scary,” Konkova recalls.

Yaroslav was one of 127 children aged 3 to 7 who were diagnosed with dysentery after eating food at seven state-run day care centers and kindergartens in Moscow in mid-December.

While reports of dysentery are not new in Russia, they mostly have struck provincial areas far from the capital and in much smaller outbreaks. Even more unusual is that the catering firm blamed by opposition activists for the outbreak at six of the seven Moscow sites is owned by businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin.

Prigozhin, who has won $2 billion in contracts for supplying food to Moscow schools since 2009, built an empire on catering and maintenance contracts for the army and has been nicknamed “Putin’s chef” for serving Kremlin functions. He also has been reported to run a private military company known as Wagner that sends Russian contractors to Syria and other countries.

The magnate was among the Russians indicted last year by a U.S. grand jury in the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, alleging he funded the internet trolls involved in interfering with the U.S. presidential election in 2016. The U.S. also imposed sanctions on Prigozhin and two of his companies, Concord Catering and Concord Management and Consulting. Prigozhin has denied any involvement, and Putin said last year that while he knew the businessman, he “doesn’t count him” among his friends.

Prigozhin’s company has denied it is to blame for the dysentery outbreak. The cases have caused an outcry, thanks to a lawyer who has turned a spotlight on the caterers and has mounted a campaign to help the parents whose children fell ill.

Lyubov Sobol, who works for the investigative team of anti-corruption campaigner and opposition leader Alexei Navalny, documented Prigozhin’s rise from ex-convict in St. Petersburg to Putin’s Kremlin circle. She has taken up the case on behalf of the parents of the stricken children.

She also has a personal interest in sanitary conditions at the schools, since her 5-year-old daughter attends a Moscow day care center, although not one of those that were a ected.

Inna Chepeleva, whose daughter attended day care at School No. 1357 and came down with pneumonia attributed to the dysentery outbreak, said she was shocked at the refusal of o cials there to explain what happened.

“Something was going on, but we knew nothing,” she said.

Even though 11 children at day care at School No. 1357 had symptoms consistent with dysentery, the day care center wasn’t shut down for a quarantine for nearly three days.

A month after Sobol began a campaign on the outbreak, which included a YouTube video that got more than 300,000 views, Russia’s chief investigative body launched a criminal inquiry into conditions at the day care centers.

Separately, parents of 27 children filed a lawsuit against Moscow authorities and Concord Ready-Meals Factory. The trial was supposed to start in April but the court has suspended hearings for at least two months pending the o cial probe. Another group of parents filed a similar lawsuit last month.

The Federal Consumer Oversight Agency confirmed 127 cases of dysentery. At public hearings in March, the capital’s chief sanitary o cial, Yelena Andreyeva, denied early reports that blamed it on cottage cheese supplied by a company from southern Russia. Health and education o cials would not say whether the outbreak would make them reconsider signing new contracts with Concord.