The palaces, yachts and vineyards provided to Vladimir Putin by friends and oligarchs can now be linked to what appears to be an informal network with assets worth more than $ 4.5 billion (£ 3.7 billion).
A digital trace on paper seems to suggest that a number of holiday homes and other assets used by the Russian president, which according to available records belong to or have been owned by different individuals, businesses, and charities, are linked by a mail domain name. common electronic. , LLCInvest.ru.
Putin’s diagram
A snapshot of last September’s leaked e-mail exchanges further suggests that directors and administrators associated with some of the separate entities that own and manage these assets have discussed day-to-day business issues as if they were part of a single organization. .
An anti-corruption expert in Russia, who asked for anonymity given the political situation in Moscow, said the findings raised questions about whether there was a level of “common management”.
“LLCInvest is mostly like a cooperative, or an association, in which its members can exchange profits and property,” they suggested.
For nearly two decades, Putin has been accused of secretly accumulating great wealth through proxies, fueled by a series of leaked revelations such as Pandora’s newspapers about the fortunes of his loved ones.
Sergey Kolesnikov, a businessman, claimed 10 years ago that he had been behind a scheme that allowed a group of Russia’s leading oligarchs to pool billions of rubles into a kind of “investment fund” for profit of Putin, who was then acting as principal. minister. The allegations were denied and Kolesnikov fled Russia.
Last month, the UK government contrasted Putin’s “lavish lifestyle” with Russian official records listing “modest assets” as a small flat in St. Petersburg, two Soviet-era cars from the 1950s. , a trailer and a small garage.
Alexei Navalny has claimed that this £ 1 billion palace was built for Putin’s personal use in Gelendzhik on the Black Sea. Photography: AP
After a year of research, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and the Russian-language news site Meduza have identified 86 companies and nonprofits whose representatives appear to be using the domain name. common LLCinvest, often alongside companies. email accounts.
The claims of a secret presidential fortune are denied and no chain of ownership leading to Putin has been identified. A Kremlin spokesman said: “The President of the Russian Federation is in no way related to or affiliated with the objects and organizations you have named.”
Villa Sellgren is owned by Sergey Rudnov, the son of a childhood friend of Putin’s. Photo: Navalny.com
According to OCCRP and Meduza, assets linked to surrounding organizations or corporate structures in which the LLCinvest.ru email domain appears to have been used include:
-
A £ 1 billion palace that Alexei Navalny has claimed was built for Putin’s personal use in Gelendzhik on the Black Sea. Billionaire oligarch Arkady Rotenberg, who is under EU and US sanctions, has claimed ownership of the property. Corporate records from the Spark database in Russia indicated since June that the property belongs to a company called Kompleks, whose parent company is Binom. The director of the company Binom until July last year appears to have an email domain LLCInvest.ru registered. LLCinvest.ru is still listed on Spark, Russia’s largest database of companies, as a contact.
-
Hectares of vineyards around Gelendzhik Palace. Navalny has claimed that the wineries were a “hobby” of Putin that had gone out of control. The vineyards surrounding the palace belong to a non-profit organization founded by two Putin associates, Gennady Timchenko and Vladimir Kolbin, both also under Western sanctions. Kolbin and others associated with the vineyards appear to have email accounts LLCInvest.ru.
-
The ski resort of Igora, Leningrad Oblast, where Putin’s daughter’s wedding took place in 2013. According to land records, is owned by Ozone, a company in the which is Putin’s friend, chairman of Bank Rossiya and top shareholder, Yuri Kovalchuk, who is under western. sanctions, has been of great interest. The email account LLCInvest.ru is a contact of the Spark records of the Ozone parent company, Relax. Ozon is in no way related to the e-commerce giant of the same name listed on the Nasdaq.
-
A villa north of St. Petersburg, known by locals as “Putin’s house.” Villa Sellgren was owned by Oleg Rudnov, a childhood friend of Putin, and inherited by his son Sergey Rudnov, through a company called North. Rudnov appears to be using LLCinvest.ru email addresses, according to Spark records.
-
A timber-framed building north of St. Petersburg known as the Fisherman’s Hut. Filtered emails from a construction company suggest that three different companies using the domain name owned different plots around the complex, while a fourth entity, LLCInvest, a non-profit organization called Revival of Maritime Traditions, managed the construction. This same foundation, recently subjected to Western sanctions, owns two yachts, Shellest and Nega, which according to the US Treasury are linked to Putin.
Asset map of Russia
The $ 4.5 billion in assets held by LLCInvest includes large cash deposits. Two non-profit foundations, co-founded by Timchenko and Kolbin, which according to Spark’s corporate records appear to use the domain name, have significant funds at their disposal.
The development of agricultural initiatives had 17 billion rubles (248 million pounds) in its deposit account at the end of 2020, while the development of an effective investment market had more than 20 billion rubles (292 million). of sterling) in long-term deposits and almost 5 billion rubles (73 million pounds). ) in short-term deposits at the end of 2020, according to publicly available accounts.
The yacht Shellest is owned by the non-profit organization Revival of Maritime Traditions.
LLCinvest is not a standard e-mail provider open to the public like Yahoo, but a domain on a server owned by Moskomsvyaz, a telecommunications company that has close ties to Bank Rossiya. The St. Petersburg Bank is under Western sanctions and described by the US Treasury as “the personal bank of senior officials of the Russian Federation.”
Rossiya has also been described as “Putin’s bank” for his role in the alleged execution of the Russian leader’s bid. The Kremlin has denied these links or influences.
The discovery of the common domain of e-mail was made by analyzing filtered metadata from the servers of Moskomsvyaz, which seems to show the names of senders and recipients of e-mails LLCinvest.ru, the subject and the time of correspondence. This was contrasted with open source logging and independent filtering of the content of some complete messages.
Sign up for your Daily Business Today email or follow Guardian Business on Twitter at @BusinessDesk
Moskomsvyaz and all but one person who appears to have used LLCInvest.ru’s email addresses did not respond to requests for comment. The purpose of the common e-mail service or the motivation for the apparent cooperation on personnel and logistics issues is unclear.
There is no suggestion that all LLCInvest.ru users be involved in the management of assets that have been linked to Putin’s reports. Only one man who uses an email account LLCinvest.ru in his role as director of several companies, spoke on the phone when called. He stated that he did not know the nature of his work.
“I’m a humble employee and I take care of my own business,” he said when asked. “I just sign papers. You know how sometimes homeless people register as directors of a company. I’m not homeless, but I sign papers the way they do without going into details.”
“If my company was part of a large holding company, I wouldn’t know,” he added. Man’s identity is retained for his own safety.