Ivan Besedin becomes head of Moscow subway

Former head of the Kaliningrad railways Ivan Besedin has replaced
Dmitry Gayev as the head of the Moscow subway, press-secretary of the
Moscow mayor Gulnara Penkova said.

Gayev has headed the Moscow subway since 1995. He has now resigned.
The Russian Prosecutor General's Office initiated investigations in
December 2010 and requested the Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin to
consider dismissing Gayev. The prosecution says that Gayev has been
earning illegal income worth 112 million rubles in the last 10 years.
The investigation says that he had deals affecting the prices for
transport. Violations worth 3.3 billion rubles were revealed.

Ivan Sergeyevich Besedin, the new subway chief, was born in Baku on
February 13, 1954. He is a professional railway specialist.

He graduated at the Moscow Institute of Engineers of Railway
Transport. Besedin was working at the central office of the Russian
Transport Ministry in 1985-1999, starting from the position of the
chief experting and becoming the first deputy minister. In 1999-2000
he was the first deputy head of the Moscow railways. In 2000-2001
Besedin was the deputy chairman a committee of the Railways
Organization in Warsaw (Poland). In 2002-2003 he was the deputy
chairman of Russian Federal Energy Commission. Besedin was the head of
the federal unitary enterprise "All-Russian science research institute
of railway transport" in 2003-2006. He headed the Kaliningrad office
of the Russian Railways since 2006.

Sobyanin initiated active solution of transport problems in Moscow. He
speeded up the subway construction and offered switching to
constructing subway stations using top projects, rather than
individual. Specialists say he cut the costs by 20%. 53 km of subway
will be constructed in 2011-2014, within the framework of the program
called "A city comfortable for life". The Maryino-Zyablikovo section
was launched in 2011. 56 billion rubles of investments will be spent
on subway construction and updating of the carriage park.