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 had received seven million rubles ($108,000) for "emergency prevention work." Investigators believed that much of that work was done on paper alone and more than four million rubles were embezzled. Renaissance Restoration also tried several times to increase the cost of its contract in its capacity as the restoration's official planner. In 2016, a check on restoration work in the Pukovskaya Observatory revealed that the company had hired a subcontractor for construction, and that company in turn hired workers from Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan who did not have the legal permissions necessary to work in restoration.

Renaissance Restoration's only competitor for the VDNKh projects was the St. Petersburg company Bast, whose former co-owner, Ivan Selilo, now leads Renaissance Restoration itself.

To complete construction on the fountains, the company hired a Moscow subcontractor called Pirit-99, which is owned by the businessman Alexander Urbansky. It was Urbansky who was quoted in VDNKh's Facebook post assuring the public that the elements would soon counteract that landmark's paint job. In the 1990s, Urbansky led the Moscow branch of the St. Petersburg company Yevroznak, one of the larges street sign producers in Russia.

Immediately after the fire in Paris's Notre Dame, both Renaissance Restoration and Pirit-99 offered to help with the cathedral's reconstruction.

What went wrong in the Stone Flower's restoration

The fountain's facelift has sparked more controversy than any of Renaissance Restoration's previous projects, especially its treatment of the fountain's smalt, a specially manufactured colored glass. Fedot Pukhlov, who has studied the history of VDNKh for 30 years and has been a steadfast critic of the exhibition park's restoration project, told Meduza that he has examples of smalt from the original fountain and from the restored version in his possession. According to Pukhlov, the new smalt is made at a much lower level of quality. He also noted that the new smalt was installed in much larger pieces, which significantly worsened the fountain's appearance. Pukhlov said that specialists working on the restorations told him those changes were forced by tight construction deadlines.

At the same time, Yelena Antonova, who leads the monumental sculpture division of Russia's state restoration research institute, said that installing