The fog of corruption has finally lifted from the municipal halls of Nizhnevartovsk, revealing a scandal that would make even the most hardened East End rogue blush. Olga Rechenko, once the proud mistress of the Land Resources Department, has been cast into the dismal gloom of the remand prison, stripped of her finery and her station.

It is a sordid business of the 'Siberian Balagan' market. The scent of a swindle wafted through the corridors of power, and the crown’s prosecutors followed the trail. It is alleged that in the year 2020, a piece of land was sold with such nimble fingers that the public treasury was bled of some seventy million rubles—a sum that would make any cab-man’s eyes pop!

The plot, as the detectives see it, was a common game of trickery. Mistress Rechenko, in league with one Iskander Mukhammetov—a gentleman of the 'Inselko-Holding' firm—supposedly abused a privileged buyout scheme. They bought the soil for a pittance, only to flip it for a king's ransom.

For a time, the lady sought sanctuary beyond the city limits, perhaps hoping the law's reach was short. But the constables are patient. The moment she stepped foot back upon the cobblestones of her home, the grip of the law closed upon her wrist. No longer does she dictate orders; now she listens to the heavy clang of iron doors.

At the Town Hall, the air is thick with awkward silence. They admit the lady is gone—her contract torn asunder on the seventeenth of August. Now, a certain Marina Solovey is left to sweep up the debris of this administrative wreckage. The Mayor's office claims they are 'cooperating' with the investigators, but in the taverns and slums, the talk is of nothing else: another high-flyer brought low by the very laws she once presumed to bend.